TVision already provides data to help iSpot and VideoAmp estimate the number of people watching from among the millions of households whose devices they monitor. But it has only about 5,000 households compared to 42,000 for Nielsen, which has led some industry watchers to say it needs to expand coverage to deliver comparable accuracy.
Liu has said TVision's system delivers an effective number of participating households not much smaller than Nielsen’s. But the new cash infusion could help TVision ultimately add more households, he said.
Among TVision's first priorities with the new cash, however, will be adding devices in existing households to capture viewing from additional TV sets in those households. Liu said about 85% of viewing in households happens on the primary TV, but that building out coverage of secondary TVs will improve TVision’s data.
Access to TVision’s CTV measurement has become more important since iSpot expects to ultimately be part of the optimization toolbox and currency used by buyers of Netflix and Disney ad-supported services, Muller said. While Netflix has said it will use Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings as currency measurement starting at some point next year, Muller characterized client interest in using iSpot to measure Netflix ad audiences as “extremely high.”
“In the future, it’s hard for me to believe brands will only want to rely on one particular method to measure CTV campaigns,” Liu said. He pointed to Amazon’s weekly publication of numbers based on its own server data supplemented by a non-Nielsen third-party—routinely higher by more than a million viewers than Nielsen’s data—as a good reason why.