GigaOM » Trendrr.tv

The state of cross-platform media measurement

lydialoizides — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:30:17 +0000

Today brand advertisers must go to great lengths to find their audiences. Thus, brand advertising’s focus on cross-platform media measurement has grown dramatically in the past five years. But the ecosystem, which this report examines from a broad perspective, struggles to solve the correlation between the two media-viewing behemoths, TV and online. Within the next 36 months, the measurement of cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars from TV to online viewing, the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, and another political and Olympic cycle. In the meantime, new types of measurement of online behavior and ad performance will come to market.

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Social-TV apps and consumer behavior

Nicole — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 06:55:18 +0000

A new category of digital media has emerged in the living room: social TV. This relatively new concept can be defined as any application, website or software that allows viewers to interact with television programming and share that interaction with others. Currently social TV occurs in three ways: organically, as pure play or through TV- or set-top-enabled communication. This report will focus on the pure-play aspect of social TV as it relates to content providers, television networks and advertisers. It answers key questions relating to the segment’s growth potential, important companies, their competitors and likely business models for the future.

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How social is your favorite TV show? Bluefin Labs knows.

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:40:46 +0000

TV viewers are increasingly engaging in social media while watching their favorite shows. But which shows are drawing the most commenters and the largest share of the conversation? Cambridge, Mass.-based startup Bluefin Labs is using social media to not only measure engagement during TV shows, but also to find connections between shows that those viewers enjoy watching.

The company’s Response Level and Response Share metrics are essentially new ways to think about how a TV show stacks up against the competition. The new metrics are designed to measure how audiences talk about shows, both in terms of total number of commenters on a show, and the percentage of that show’s share of the conversation during the time in which it aired. And it’s rolling out its Bluefin Signals dashboard as a way for broadcasters and advertisers to see the connections between these shows and conversations.

The platform determines what people are commenting on without the more traditional use of scanning for hashtags or keywords during a certain show, using video fingerprinting technology to determine what’s happening onscreen instead. It then matches TV action with social media response. Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO of Bluefin, Labs refers to this matching up as “mapping the TV Genome.”

The platform measures social media responses to more than 3,000 TV shows and more than 100,000 individual airings of those shows. Each month, it processes about 3 billion social media comments, matching them up against 2 million minutes of live TV during that time. The company hopes to have full coverage of all live TV shows next year.

While knowing how many viewers are commenting about a particular show might be of some value to broadcasters and advertisers who use social media sentiment during a show as a proxy for engagement, the more valuable tool might be in Bluefin Labs’ ability to draw connections between shows. This data on “cross-show engagement” is useful in determining affinity between shows — for example, recognizing that fans of One Tree Hill are also likely to watch Hellcats and 90210.

That data can be used by broadcasters to help increase viewership — for example, running small ads on one show to promote another that fans might also like. Or it can be used by advertisers: If ad inventory on one show is in high demand, but its viewers have an affinity toward a show with a lower profile, agencies and brands can reach the same group of people with a less costly ad buy by betting on the second show.

Bluefin Labs isn’t the only company striving to measure social engagement with TV: Wiredset’s Trendrr recently introduced a social media TV chart, and SocialGuide aims to track social media mentions of shows in real-time.

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Which TV Shows Are People Talking About? SocialGuide Will Tell You

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:08:31 +0000

More than half of consumers watch TV with a laptop, tablet or mobile device in their hands, and a growing number are posting to Twitter or Facebook while doing so. But which shows are they talking about? That’s the point of SocialGuide, which aims to provide a real-time view into which shows are stirring up the most conversation.

Like other social TV startups, SocialGuide enables users to set up individual accounts, look for their friends and share what they’re watching on Twitter and Facebook. Once signed in, they can designate their location and TV provider, and get listings for the most talked about shows that are on, thanks to a partnership it struck with Tribune Media Services. Its SocialGuide also lets users see what their friends are watching as a way to help foster conversation between them.

But the consumer-facing aspect of the business — getting people to sign in and share what they’re watching — is probably the least interesting part of what it’s doing. Even if viewers don’t log in to the service or explicitly “check in” to any TV shows, SocialGuide can still provide valuable data to both TV viewers and the content owners themselves. The site works by scouring Twitter in real time for conversations about shows as they are airing, creating a listing of the most social shows on TV. It then aggregates of those social conversations into one spot. The result is a real-time social channel listing.

While SocialGuide can provide a high-level overview of all shows that are on, it also breaks down rankings into subcategories, such as series, reality, movies, sports and news. And each of the shows gets its own show page, which brings together all the Twitter or Facebook conversations as they happen. Customized show pages are one way SocialGuide hopes to make money. By providing skinnable landing pages for individual shows, it can allow content owners to take control of their online presence on the guide. SocialGuide also is able to provide real-time data: not just about how users are interacting with its own site, but what they’re talking about elsewhere as well.

SocialGuide isn’t alone in aggregating real-time conversations about shows: Yap.TV, BeeTV and even VH1′s Co-Star app all bring in conversations that happen around live TV on social networks. Nor is it the only aggregator collecting data around which shows are most popular at any given time, as Wiredset’s Trendrr.tv provides similar data.

SocialGuide is still officially in beta, but expects to publicly launch soon. It also expects to introduce new applications for the iPhone, iPad and Android-based mobile devices over the coming weeks. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup has a full-time staff of four, and has raised $1.5 million from angel investors that include Alex Zubillaga, the former head of digital strategy at Warner Music.

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Who’s Winning in Social TV? Trendrr.tv Can Tell You

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:26:58 +0000

Did AMC’s new show The Killing make a killing on social networks in its first night? Can any TV program compete with ~~NBC~~ Fox’s Glee for social media interaction week-to-week?

It used to be you’d have to pay a social research firm to answer those kinds of questions for you. But with the launch of new site Trendrr.tv, social media research firm Wiredset is opening up some of its data to illustrate the effect social media can have on some shows.

It’s increasingly clear that social networks are helping to grow TV audiences and create more engagement with viewers on broadcast and cable TV. To track that trend, we here at GigaOM have been using Trendrr social TV data for a while to help understand which shows were hottest on social network sites, and in the past have published a weekly Statshot column that put these graphs into context. Now similar data will be available every day for whomever might want to check out which shows garnered the most attention on Twitter last night and over the last week.

Trendrr.tv aggregates data from public Facebook posts and Twitter mentions, as well as check-ins from social TV applications like GetGlue and Miso. Trendrr.tv isn’t just about which show created the most buzz on a given night or over the past week; it can also be used to identify trends in viewership, according to Wiredset CEO Mark Ghuneim. “Past seeing what TV shows have the highest level of engaged two screen activity … you can also see what types of shows are driving conversation,” Ghuneim wrote in an email.

For instance, live events and reality TV programming frequently draw the highest social interaction on broadcast TV, as you can see in today’s Daily Broadcast Top 10, which ranks the Academy of Country Music Awards and Celebrity Apprentice tops in last night’s rankings. But on cable, new scripted dramas are performing strongly, as AMC’s The Killing and Showtime’s The Borgias ranked number one and number two for Sunday night.

Moving to a weekly view, you can see that Fox heavyweight Glee is far-and-away the most popular broadcast TV show on social networks. Meanwhile, even though MTV’s Jersey Shore garnered more attention than any other cable show over the previous week, it still pales in comparison to some of the broadcast shows. The MTV reality show would have been seventh on the broadcast top 10.

While the daily and weekly version of the data has been made free, Wiredset will continue to offer more advanced data such as location-based analysis as part of its professional social media dashboard.

In the site’s FAQ, the company says that the professional version of Trendrr.tv “includes the ability to look at a show and compare its performance by network, genre, broadcast/cable, day of airing and time slot.” Ghuneim noted that in the paid version, you can also see how different shows are performing differently across social networks.

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