Indiantelevision.com Team

(15 February 2008 8:30 pm)

MUMBAI: The Nielsen Company has acquired TV analysis company Audience Analytics and its Audience Watch software. This will significantly strengthen the company's ability to process, integrate, analyze and report large quantities of audience measurement data.

This transaction, which was announced on Friday during Nielsen's Annual Client Meeting on Audience Measurement in Las Vegas, will provide Nielsen clients with several immediate benefits:

• The Audience Watch software will become the primary delivery mechanism for the company's Nielsen DigitalPlus product line which will provide analytics on tuning and interactive television usage based on STB data, as well as measurement of VoD transactions.
  
  
• Nielsen will develop a single platform to integrate complex and varied data sets. This includes the company's television, internet, mobile and consumer data, which are integrated for NielsenConnect products, and the TV/Internet convergence panel, which will provide a single source view of the interactions between television viewing and in-home Internet usage.

Audience Analytics produces programming and reach and frequency analyses based on Nielsen Media Research's national respondent level sample-based data, as well as commercial and proprietary information from other industry sources. Its advanced database engine evaluates audience ratings and shares, and its state-of-the-art software can process large census-based data sets, often in seconds.

The acquisition will enable Nielsen to offer new insights to advertisers, agencies, broadcast and cable networks, local television stations, MSOs, satellite operators, ISPs, wireless providers and telephone companies.

Nielsen informs that Audience Analytics founder Mark Cannon will join the Nielsen Company as SVP of analytics technology. He will lead an advanced applications team to sustain and expand this technology across a growing number of complex data sets, and provide client support in developing the analytics techniques required to arrive at solutions.

"The acquisition of Audience Analytics' software and tools provides Nielsen with a powerful platform for new applications we can take to market immediately," said Nielsen Company president of media product leadership Jim O'Hara.

"It not only gives us the ability to process and deliver set-top box data sets, but also enables us to report accurately that data down to very granular levels - whether second-by-second, household-by-household or even set-top box-by-set-top box. Further, this tool allows for our respondent level tuning and demographic data to be analyzed along with these various set-top box data sets, providing our clients access to the highest quality, most comprehensive analytical insights in the marketplace. This means Nielsen and its clients can receive, process and analyze complex, integrated data, faster and more comprehensively than ever before," added O'Hara.

"In today's dynamic technology environment, companies can only maintain their marketplace advantage through continuous investment, strategic alliances, and leveraging human capital," said Nielsen's EVP of global business services Mitchell Habib.

"This acquisition is another example that the 'New Nielsen' will maintain focus and continue to bring the best technology assets to bear for our clients."