iSpot Acquires Tunity in Bid to Deliver New Measurement of Out of Home Audiences
variety.comBrian Steinberg Senior TV EditorThe media industry’s measurement wars are expanding beyond counting traditional video audiences.iSpot, the measurement company that figures prominently in plans by NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia to offer alternatives to Nielsen in the sector’s looming “upfront” marketplace, will acquire Tunity, an analytics company that analyzes consumer viewing habits in public locations nationwide, including restaurants, offices, bars and hotels.“We want to account for all viewing across all screens,” says Sean Muller, iSpot’s founder and CEO, in an interview.
The Tunity acquisition, he says, could be “powerful, both for our advertising clients who invest heavily in tentpole events and programs that are consumed outside the home and for our media partners.” The companies did not disclose financial terms.Keeping track of so-called “out of home” audiences has become more critical to TV networks, who understand that significant chunks of viewership for news, sports and other live programming is often found outside a consumer’s main habitat.
Nielsen introduced technology to measure those crowds at the start of the 2020-2021 TV season, and its research a year earlier indicated that counting out of home viewers could result in an 11% uptick in audiences for sports events and a 7% increase in audiences for news programming.But Nielsen’s efforts fell short.
Late last year, the company disclosed that its efforts to count out of home viewers were marred by a software problem and that it had been undercounting audiences since the fall of 2020.
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