That’s how the media and entertainment metadata provider will officially be referred to by Nielsen, which on Feb. 1 completed its $560 million acquisition of Gracenote.
The company will continue to operate from its Emeryville, Calif., headquarters.
Nielsen says that the completion of its purchase of Gracenote expands its footprint with major clients, largely due to Gracenote’s global database and technology solutions, which can be found in MVPDs, “smart televisions,” streaming music services, connected devices, media players and in-car infotainment systems.
That’s because Nielsen now possesses full access to the Gracenote data and technology that underpins the programming guides and personalized user experience around the consumption of video, music, and sports content. Gracenote provides reference information for over 12 million movie and television listings and 200 million music tracks, driving the interfaces of the major streaming digital media services, as well as the infotainment systems in over 75 million automobiles.
As part of the Nielsen Total Audience measurement framework, Gracenote’s metadata will help Nielsen in providing clients with greater automation for capturing content across platforms and additional resources to demonstrate consumer engagement.
“Bringing Gracenote under the Nielsen umbrella creates an industry-leading media discovery, metadata and measurement business strongly positioned as the market shifts to greater personalization,” said Karthik Rao, President of Expanded Verticals at Nielsen. “This acquisition combines Nielsen’s audience measurement and analytics with Gracenote’s data and technology, providing clients with deeper resources to capture consumer engagement across the evolving content ecosystem.”
As previously noted, Gracenote will operate as a business unit within Nielsen’s Watch segment.
Nielsen will provide more details on the expected financial impact of Gracenote when it reports results for Q4 2016 on Feb. 9.
Nielsen shares finished Wednesday’s trading at $41.32, up 41 cents. The company’s stock is trading at levels not seen since November 2014, largely due to shareholder disapproval of Nielsen’s poor Q3 results.
Nielsen missed many of the Street’s forecasts, reporting a 7% dip in GAAP net income, to $132 million, and diluted net income per share of 36 cents, off 5.3%. For non-GAAP results, growth was seen — adjusted net income (ANI) increased 3.1%, to $266 million. This reflects a diluted ANI per share gain of 5.7%, to 74 cents. But, that fell short of the average estimate of six analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research, of 76 cents per share.
Total Q3 revenue of $1.57 billion, although up from $1.53 billion in Q3 2015, also missed Street estimates. The analysts surveyed by Zacks anticipated revenue of $1.59 billion.
