The service was developed by TRA, an ad ROI measurement firm that TiVo acquired in a $20m deal last summer. As well as measuring ad exposure, TRA matches it to purchase data to gauge the sales impact of campaigns.

At the core of the service is a single-source sample of over 100,000 US households.

TRA chief executive Mark Lieberman said: “The ability to understand whether a household is exposed to an advertiser’s campaigns, both on TV and online, and correlate that exposure to purchasing behaviour, all using very large data sets to ensure better accuracy, is invaluable to the process of optimising and allocating media campaigns.”

Speaking to analysts yesterday to discuss the company’s full-year results, TiVo CEO Tom Rogers (pictured) said he expects the research and analytics business to become a larger contributor to the company’s growth.

“We see a very big research pie out there and the current players [are] not very responsive to the combination of TV viewing granularity and internet viewing with a very broad measurement pool of homes and purchase data,” said Rogers.

“We see an increasing number of advertisers coming onboard with our approach, so it is still a business we are investing in and one we see a good deal of potential in.”