LONDON, UK — In the new TV landscape, measurement companies want to know who is watching a show and at which moments.
In the near future, facial recognition technology on TV sets could help them do just that.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Yan Liu, CEO & Co-Founder, TVision, explains why this data will help “calibrate” TV ratings.
Look who’s watching
TVision is one of the leading suppliers of computer vision facial recognition technology that understands which specific people in a home are in front of the TV, and whether they are attentive.
Whilst there is unlikely to be a day when the majority of TV owners are comfortable with being monitored, TVision uses a voluntary panel of households who have deployed its tech.
Given enough data points describing individual panel members, the data could be modelled-up to boost the accuracy of measurement-platform viewing data.
The system is also used by Lumen Research to power its attention measurement metrics.
Calibration for the nation
Liu calls it “calibration”.
“For a very long time, people have been using panels to generate TV ratings,” he says. “But, in the future, we believe panels should be used for calibration, which means you need to marry panel data with big data such as smart TV data or set box data.
“Those data is at household level, not personal level, but we all know the marketing is about each person. You need to understand how many people are watching TV, who are these people.
“By marrying the calibration panel data and big data set, we can make the person-level cross-platform measurement, which we believe will be the currency for the future.”
Person-level measurement
In November 2022, TVision raised a $16 million investment round led by iSpot, which was already a TVision customer, making for a total $58 million raised.
“iSpot and TVision both believe in the panel-based, personal-level measurement, which can be complemented by the big data such as smart TV dataset” Lieu says.
“iSpot has a huge landscape on the smart TV data, TVision has the very best, personal-level panel calibration data.
“So marrying these two data set, we can create a very, very advanced cross-platform measurement data.”
Future development
But the investment was also with one eye on the future. Lieu says the money will speed-up its product development.
“In addition to the investment, iSpot is going to purchase more data from TVision, especially focused on CTV,” Lieu adds.
“We also want to build more products on top of our panel asset and the funding will be used for our own product development as well.”
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of The Future of TV Advertising Global forum, filmed in London, December 2022. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
