If you own a VIZIO television and you’ve opted-in to allow your smart TV’s usage statistics to be given to a provider of “currency-grade” Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data, your viewership of local TV stations will now be included in the information provided to marketers and advertisers.
The rollout of the smart TV tuner technology from Inscape is designed to increase its coverage to thousands of local stations. “In doing so, local television will now finally boast a big data source for over-the-air viewership spanning all stations and markets and putting it on the same playing field as national stations,” the company says.
Later this month, Inscape’s Tuner Data will be made available to participating clients and comes as viewer measurement and seeking audience insights from local broadcast TV signals remains perceived as a major challenge and “a blind spot for the industry,” Inscape says.
Specifically, new Tuner Data will layer on additional data points collected directly from built-in televisions tuners to supplement exposure signals for smaller markets.
Heralding the new offering from Inscape is Comscore Chief Innovation Officer David Algranati. “For Comscore, having multiple sources of data capture is a key component of our TV measurement approach, which spans across all 210 local markets,” he says. “Incorporating Smart TV Tuner Data from Inscape gives Comscore additional views into local station viewing behaviors, enabling us to better serve our clients with the most precise measurement.”
Charbel Makhoul, Vice President of Product Management, Data Science and Analytics at VIZIO/Inscape, adds, “By unlocking the potential of local TV in this game-changing way and bringing the full power of big data to OTA signals, clients and the industry as a whole will now have a critical entrypoint to previously unfeasible attribution of local TV content.”
Depending on their industry, participating partners are being told by Inscape that the Tuner Data may be used to drive specific uses, such as optimizing local ad spend with granular device-level data; enriching first-party data to help content strategy and analyzing audiences holistically across national and local TV markets in a singular feed.
“Considering that local TV over-the-air advertising revenue in 2023 was $15.4 billion and is expected to increase to $18.8 billion in the 2024 election year (a 3.4% increase), it’s mission critical that the local TV industry have the most comprehensive datasets in order to drive budget optimization, shape effective business strategies and maximize inventory,” Inscape says. “By giving local media buyers and sellers expanded coverage in the local markets – which help power enhanced measurement capabilities – Inscape is doing just that.”
