Comscore has announced a renewal and expansion of its six-year-old partnership with Vizio’s Inscape for the unit to provide smart TV data for the vendor’s audience measurement system.
Since 2018, Comscore, which delivers data science and audience insights for linear TV operators and streaming companies alike, has integrated automatic content recognition (ACR) data from Inscape in its TV measurement and ratings product.
ACR is a so-called “glass-level” technology that’s capable of detecting what’s playing on a media device, in this case the smart TV screen, providing information about consumption and viewing habits for content and ads across sources.
Inscape is a leading provider of currency-grade smart TV data from millions of opted-in Vizio TVs. Over the past few years it’s built up datasets, including a National Representative Panel dataset and last year adding streaming ad data to the mix. The Vizio division’s smart TV data has provided Comscore with unique insights it doesn’t get through direct relationships with traditional linear pay TV providers and virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs). And Inscape’s offering to Comscore has increased over time.
Back in January, for example, Inscape announced the expansion of its coverage of local stations by tapping directly into tuners built into smart TVs in every local U.S. TV market.
The renewal means that Comscore will continue to leverage Inscape’s data in its measurement offering across all 210 local markets. The relationship between the two companies has grown over time to also include proprietary ad tech.
With the integration of Inscape data, Comscore has developed, among other intellectual property, a patent-pending method to deduplicate data from smart TVs and set-top boxes. This system, the companies said, provides more accurate audience measurement, ensuring viewers don’t get counted more than once. This method, the companies claim “marks a significant advancement in TV measurement, allowing Comscore to offer a more granular and precise understanding of audience behaviors across different devices.”
“By leveraging Inscape data from over 24 million opted-in devices annually, Comscore continues to set new standards in TV audience measurement, providing the industry with critical insights into viewing behaviors,” said Ken Norcross, VP of data licensing and strategy at Vizio/Inscape, in a statement.
Added David Algranati, Comscore's chief innovation officer: "The integration of Inscape’s smart TV data not only enhances our TV measurement capabilities but also lays the groundwork for future advancements in cross-channel audience insights. This partnership will promote a better understanding of ad exposure and content engagement in a rapidly evolving media landscape.”
For Inscape, the key partnership renewal announcement with Comscore comes a little over a week after the Vizio unit unveiled an agreement with Locality, a local video advertising provider, to deploy insights to help resolve data reporting inefficiencies for advertisers across local broadcast and streaming TV.
It also comes as Comscore works to compete in the measurement space alongside relative newcomers like iSpot, VideoAmp and Samba TV, as rival incumbent ratings giant Nielsen deals with its own continued challenges. While still widely used in the industry, last week news broke that Nielsen and Paramount failed to strike a new contract, reportedly related to substantial cost increases sought by Nielsen, severing a long-term relationship. Without a new Nielsen deal the programmer intends to lean on startup VideoAmp, per Axios.
On Friday, Nielsen announced Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group signed a multi-year deal for audience measurement - a change after the media company in 2023 struck a 10-year deal with VideoAmp to use the vendor as its primary and preferred TV ad sales currency.
As for smart TV data, Nielsen itself has turned to Vizio’s Inscape before, including under an expanded 2022 deal to incorporate the unit’s data in both local and national audience measurement products.