comScore Aims to Measure OTT Viewing

May 11, 2017
comScore (OTC:SCOR) has introduced comScore OTT Intelligence, a syndicated service to measure U.S. household viewing of over-the-top ...

comScore (OTC:SCOR) has introduced comScore OTT Intelligence, a syndicated service to measure U.S. household viewing of over-the-top (OTT) content on TV screens. The new service is based on the company's proprietary Total Home Panel - a research platform designed to measure consumer behavior across home network-connected devices.

OTT content viewing represents a growing segment of the cross-platform TV viewing landscape, but until now the behavior has been difficult to quantify. Though it is well-known that OTT services like Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) are gaining in importance, the inability to measure activity streamed through TV-connected devices - for example, streaming boxes/sticks, smart TVs, and gaming consoles - has made media measurement for OTT a challenge. comScore OTT Intelligence is intended to illuminate this difficult-to-measure segment of the viewing market.

"With very limited insight into viewing behavior across providers, the OTT market has largely been a black box," said Mike Rich, comScore vice president of emerging products. "As more TV viewers look beyond traditional content sources, it's more important than ever for networks, content producers, device manufacturers and others in the ecosystem to understand this growing segment of cross-platform viewing."

comScore OTT Intelligence is delivered to subscribers through a dynamic user interface that provides a single-source view of dozens of OTT content providers including Netflix, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Hulu, and YouTube. Reported measures include household reach, audience size and demographics, and usage metrics. Data can be segmented for cord-cutting and cord-never homes, as well as those with a cable or satellite subscription.

The foundation of comScore OTT Intelligence is comScore's Total Home Panel, a single-source research platform designed to measure cross-platform media consumption. It currently measures media consumption across more than 12,500 households and 150,000 active devices per month.