Rentrak Corporation

Maria Loper

Michael J Vinson

Amir Yazdani

Bruce Goerlich

Aaron J Harsh

Kim Hadfield

Melissa Martin

Systems and methods for analyzing viewing behavior of users viewing video content and advertisements are provided. A system may periodically or continuously receive tune data reflecting the viewing behavior of users, analyze the viewing behavior to determine a location and time period of advertisement blocks in a viewed segment, and determine parameters reflecting a comparison between a number of viewers that viewed the advertisement blocks and a number of viewers that viewed non-advertised content. The system may also deliver a report of the analysis to advertisers, agencies, media sellers, or other parties that are interested in measuring the effectiveness of advertisements on users. The analysis by the system can be done over multiple different types of content-distribution platforms.

Systems and method for analyzing advertisement pods

A system and method for analyzing the viewing behavior of end users that are viewing video content to determine the likely presence of one or more advertisements being viewed and to assess the viewers who stop viewing during the course of such advertisements. The system periodically or continuously receives tune data reflecting the viewing behavior of end users, analyzes the cumulative viewing behavior reflected by the received tune data, and delivers a report of the analysis to advertisers, agencies, media sellers, or other parties that are interested in measuring the effectiveness of advertisements on end users. The analysis by the system can be done over multiple different types of content-distribution platforms.

Empirical ad pod detection

Various of the disclosed embodiments contemplate television viewing behavior data collected from a plurality of television set top boxes by using aggregation to detect an excess or a deficit in viewership for a group of television set top boxes. In some embodiments, a group of set top boxes can be associated with a particular television service provider, cable television head-end, or data warehouse. Additionally, some embodiments can clean television viewing behavior data by detecting and correcting aberrant viewership in a time series, e.g. based on a weekly or an approximately monthly frequency. In some embodiments, the aberrant viewership can be detected by calculating a minimum expected number of viewers for a day and comparing it to the actual number of households that reported viewers for that day.

Aggregation-based methods for detection and correction of television viewership aberrations

A system and method are disclosed that measures audience engagement with a program based on the time a user spends viewing the program. A program's ability to retain viewers is referred to as the 'stickiness' of the program. The viewership for a program is determined by the system and then compared to viewership of various other programs in order to assess the audience retention for the analyzed program as compared to the retention of the other programs. The system calculates a 'stickiness index' for the program, which is a numerical representation of the analyzed program's stickiness as compared to the average of the other programs. The system may generate a report including the analyzed data and calculated stickiness index for advertisers, agencies, media sellers, or other parties that are interested in assessing viewership of the analyzed program.

System and method for measuring television audience engagement

A system and method for cleaning television viewing behavior data collected from set top boxes by detecting and correcting various problems that can occur in the viewing data. Three problems that may be detected and corrected by the system include: overflows of memory buffers; inclusion of non-human generated tuning events; and presence of clock offsets. After cleaning the television viewing behavior data, the cleaned data may be used to analyze audience viewing behavior in a manner that achieves a higher degree of accuracy than can be achieved by using uncleaned television viewing behavior data.

Growing community of inventors

Portland, OR, United States of America

Maria Loper