Stop Watch ‘making great strides' says Tivo boss

US-- DVR maker Tivo has boasted of year-on-year growth in its combined advertising and audience research business in the fourth quarter of 2008, despite industry-wide cutbacks to marketing expenditure.

The company did not publish revenue figures for the segment, nor did it put a hard number on the rate of growth, but CEO Tom Rogers told analysts the company was making “great strides with the research community” with its Stop Watch ratings service.

Stop Watch collects anonymous second-by-second and time-shifted viewing data from households that own Tivo's digital video recorders which the company sells on to advertisers, agencies and broadcasters.

It first launched in 2006 with data from 20,000 homes, but during Q4 the sample was upped to 100,000. Following the expansion, the company announced it was able to produce stable ratings for an additional 17 cable networks, bringing the number of broadcast and cable channels tracked to 93 – 16 of which, Tivo said, “were previously unmeasured” by Nielsen, the provider of the industry currency measure.

Responding to analyst questions about Stop Watch, Rogers said yesterday: “This is a whole new way to think about television viewing and to think about accountability and measurability in television which has brought all kinds of comments in terms of how we measure, what we measure, and the precision with which we measure.

“We've been listening to those comments continually to refine [the service] and the feedback we're getting – not only about how well we're listening to our client base, but how the changes really are creating growing credibility for the product… That gives us an increased sense of optimism about our ability to grow, even in a tough environment.”

Author: Brian Tarran

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