From today BARB is producing daily viewing figures which break down the number of people watching television programmes on four screens: TV sets, tablets, PCs and smartphones.
The UK television audience research organisation is introducing the new research in three stages, beginning with average programme audiences. The figures show the number of people watching programmes across each of the four screens. They will be published eight days after transmission, with back-dated figures available for programmes broadcast from 27th August onwards.
The figures are a result of Project Dovetail, the initiative established by BARB to meet the television and advertising industry’s need to understand how viewers are watching television on devices other than the TV set.
The complexity of this project means that BARB is launching the initiative in three stages, with the first stage today being programme average audiences. These figures show the number of people watching programmes across each of the four screens. They will be published eight days after transmission, with back-dated figures available for programmes broadcast from 27th August onwards (multiple-screen programme viewing figures will not be available prior to this date).
“Three critical ingredients enable us to extend our gold standard to cover viewing on tablets, PCs and smartphones,” said Justin Sampson, chief executive, BARB. “We have representative, observational data that show how people watch on different devices. We also have an independently-collected, census-level count of viewing to BVOD services. And we have smart algorithms that fuel the day-to-day integration of these two high-quality, complementary data sources.”
The second stage, multiple-screen reach and time spent viewing, will report the extent to which tablets and PCs increase the number of viewers and average weekly viewing time for BARB-reported channels. Headline reach and time spent viewing data will be available on the BARB website, while BARB subscribers will also have access to more complex analysis through data-processing bureaux.
The third and final stage of the process, multiple-screen advertising campaign performance, is in development, with the delivery timetable to be finalised.
A launch date will be announced at a later stage.
