NBCU Teams with TiVo to Track Cross-Platform Viewing for Olympics

NEW YORK: Data trackers TiVo Research and RealityMine have entered into a partnership with NBCUniversal to provide comprehensive single-sourced cross-platform measurement of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.

The project will be conducted during the span of the Games of the XXXI Olympiad from Rio de Janeiro, from August 5 through August 21. It's aimed at producing an in-depth analysis of how viewers who explicitly opted to participate in the study consume NBCUniversal's Olympic content across multiple devices, including TV, mobile and digital.

The research will enable NBCUniversal to measure key performance indicators such as the relationship between TV viewing and tablet/smartphone usage around NBC Olympic content, how viewers engage with content outside their home, the impact of social media on the consumption of NBC Olympic content, and the effectiveness of advertising on all NBC Olympic platforms.

"The Olympics offer us a unique opportunity to test innovative research methods and technologies," said Alan Wurtzel, the president of NBCUniversal Research. "What makes the Olympics such a notable research environment is the enormous amount of consumer activity on multiple platforms for a nearly three-week span, enhancing our ability to measure behavior and detect trends across time."

"This is a significant research advancement, which we believe will become a new multi-screen measurement standard," added Tom Rogers, CEO of TiVo. "Measuring and analyzing real-time Olympic viewership data on TV, tablets, smartphones, computers and social media platforms will reveal exactly how consumers view and engage with this major global event."

"The Olympics have emerged as truly the premier event in terms of cross-platform viewing," said Rolfe Swinton, RealityMine's CRO. "The insights we gain here into the application of methodologies for measurement will in many ways set the course for consumer media behavior analysis moving forward."