Drive Time Metrics is celebrating the expansion of its patent portfolio with the issuance on November 9 of its fifth patent.
The company is now in possession of US Patent Number 11,171,792: METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR MEDIA, ADVERTISING AND/OR IN VEHICLE CONTENT MONITORING — covering what consumers are listening to or viewing in their vehicles.
DTM’s patent family allows for data collection of the media (audio, video, etc.) actually being consumed in a vehicle for the duration of a trip, analyzed and reported on.
Today there are over 70 million “connected” vehicles in the U.S. (25% penetration), and this is anticipated to more than double by 2030. Almost all new vehicles now sold are “connected” with an embedded cellular modem. In 2021, 60.3% of licensed drivers in the US (total 229 million licensed drivers in U.S.) will drive a connected vehicle, expanding to 70.1% by 2025, according to eMarketer.
More audio is consumed in vehicles than any other listening location. The sheer scale of this data is of critical importance to the audio industry, especially for broadcasting which still represents the majority of in car listening. “The resulting large-scale census data, rather than small-scale audio panels or meters, represents the future of audio measurement,” stated Bob Maccini, one of DTM’s founders. “This is similar to what’s happening with video measurement moving to data from set top boxes and smart TVs.”
With the progression towards autonomous vehicles, measuring video in the vehicle, and time spent on other applications of any sort, becomes critical.
The DTM patent family allows for the collection and analysis of near real time data from a vehicle relating to data elements important to creating audio and video analytics. Some of these include; unique ID, time stamp, key on/off, channel, volume, location, etc. Whether a consumer is listening to AM/FM, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, Spotify, Pandora, iHeart or other streaming services, including video, anything going through the vehicles infotainment system can be measured, analyzed and reported. The applications for this cross channel data are numerous and include; audience measurement (AQH, Cume, TSL, etc.), ad impressions, ad verification (confirming ad play), ad attribution (consumer heard an ad and drove to advertisers store or went to website), ad/song/video engagement (tune in/tune out) as well as outcome based metrics. Macro content consumption trends can also be analyzed, e.g. Terrestrial audio listening share, peak listening time, shared audio channels, etc.
Today there exists the technical ability to capture audio/video data from vehicles, as well as the infrastructure to collect and manage the data from millions of vehicles, in the USA and other major global markets.
— From news distribution services
