While Nielsen ratings remain the central currency for measuring TV audiences, the process of gathering second-by-second data from millions of set-top boxes has rapidly become an alternative option that can help programmers and their advertisers learn much more about their viewers — and target them.

There’s no shortage of companies that have access to this massive flow of raw data and sift through it all to find these valuable nuggets of information, among them FourthWall Media, AT&T’s AdWorks unit and Rentrak.

Going beyond sex and age demographics, set-top data can dive several layers deeper to help ad buyers target their products more precisely and bring a digital-style approach to TV advertising.

Among this group, FourthWall collects box data from about 2.1 million homes (and roughly 4 million set-top boxes) across 90 demographic market areas.

As with other companies that collect such information, it’s all kept anonymous, but Fourth- Wall does use unique household identifiers to provide a full picture of how those homes change over time. With that data in hand, it is then free to layer it with demographic information from sources such as Acxiom. The company’s information is also used by outfits such as AOL’s Adap.tv, a unit that specializes in automated programmatic advertising online and, increasingly, for TV, and Starcom Mediavest, which taps in to make smarter media buys.

“We help a lot of companies facilitate their particular services,” Bill Feininger, president of FourthWall’s MassiveData division, said.

Feininger said he views FourthWall as both complementary and competitive to Nielsen, where he was previously employed for about 16 years. “We don’t build products that are measured products that compete with them. But on the other hand, we certainly have the data that could be used for that purpose.”

FourthWall also has the ability to collect similar data from mobile devices, which will grow in importance as TV Everywhere and other over-the-top services continue to attract eyeballs.

FourthWall’s “plumbing” has the ability to do that kind of collection. “We don’t implement that for ourselves and collect [that data], but the pieces are in place for our partners that license that technology,” Feininger said.

Rentrak, meanwhile, has a movie business that measures every time a movie ticket is sold in real time on a census basus. That information helps studios plan and shift their TV and digital media strategies practically on the fly. At the behest of programmers, it followed that years ago by measuring set-top box data as it became clear that video-on-demand would become an important extension of movie consumption. It went even further as on-demand viewing of TV shows became popular.

Rentrak now gathers information from 115 million TV sets, and, out of those VOD homes with a return path, is also measuring a subset of about 30 million, taking a look at live TV, DVR and VOD viewing, said vice chairman and CEO Bill Livek.

That kind of information enables Rentrak to precisely define who’s watching a TV show and who might also be BMW or Audi owner, and consumers “who have a propensity to buy brands when it comes to the products inside a grocery store,” Livek said.

Tapping big databases against TV viewing “helps the ad agencies and the brands become more efficient,” Livek said.

Rentrak, like FourthWall, is also keeping tabs on TV viewing on mobile devices.

“It’s still a tiny piece of the puzzle,” Livek said, noting that Rentrak is presently looking at that kind of data on a proprietary basis, “but soon it will be syndicated.”

In a similar vein, AT&T AdWorks is helping its partners tap set-top box data, poring through data generated from more than 16 million boxes across the U-verse TV universe.

There’s been a “big shift” as advertisers become increasingly interested in using digital- style methods that bring more accountability to TV advertising and are far more effective than traditional linear TV buys, Maria Mandel Dunsche, vice president of marketing at AT&T AdWorks, said.

Interest in those models is now attracting “some serious dollars,” she said, noting that the process is enabling a “digital currency to move to the TV” ecosystem.

“The set-top box can be a powerful [tool] to model potential new ways to reach a more targeted audience,” she said.

Looking ahead, AT&T Ad Works expects to expand its current TV-focused capabilities with mobile, a move that could help the company target and measure advertising across platforms. AT&T expects to announce more details later this year.

FourthWall Media has entered a partnership arrangement with Starcom MediaVest Group giving the media planning and buying agency access to FourthWall’s set-top box viewership data as a means of more closely matching advertisers to the viewers interested in them.

SMG will integrate FourthWall’s anonymous, non-aggregated granular datasets with the agency’s proprietary planning and buying platform, dubbed TARDIIS, as well as its multi-touch attribution analytics platform. The integration will enable SMG’s clients to create more precisely targeted campaigns and maximize their media buying budgets, the agency said.

The two companies have also brought in data aggregator Axciom, which has prior relationships with both, to ensure compliance with digital privacy regulations via its Safe Haven program. Safe Haven matches first-party data, advertiser data and other partners’ data, scrubbing out anything that personally identifies end users (i.e., viewers) and replacing it with a generic but unique ID to use in multiple marketing applications. (Watch a video about the Safe Haven program here.)

Bill Feininger, president of FourthWall’s MassiveData division, said SMG is the first agency to have access to its granular viewership data, which it collects from all TV channels on a second-by-second basis via technology embedded in millions of set-top boxes. The company, based in Dulles, Va., provides its technology platform for use in Cisco, Motorola, Pace and tru2way set-top boxes, and its products are in use by a broad range of U.S. cable operators.

“Being able to anonymously match set-top viewing data with target audience lists creates more precise targeting of television advertising,” Feininger said. “We can do this in a privacy-compliant fashion using Acxiom to match target audiences with their television viewing activity.”

The three-way partnership aims to enable expanded analytics that SMG can make available to its clients.

"As a longtime believer in the power of set-top box data to transform TV, it is very exciting to have this kind of access to large-scale, granular data that can help our clients more precisely plan, place and optimize media," Lisa Weinstein, president of SMG’s Global Digital, Data & Analytics unit, said.

FourthWall, a provider of cable set-top box viewing data, said the U.S. Patent office has approved a patent for its Velox bandwidth management and optimization technologies: Network Bandwidth Regulation Using Traffic Scheduling. 

Velox, the vendor said, makes second-by-second data collection possible on the full range of set-top boxes deployed by U.S. cable operator, and takes care of two critical functions in data transmission in the cable network infrastructure: guaranteed data delivery and bandwidth management.

FourthWall said those elements are particularly important in environments where the return data path is a valuable and scarce resource as it’s shared by other system components and applications. Velox, the vendor said, guarantees the data transmission within this network, overcoming some of the shortcomings of the less reliable UDP (User Datagram Protocol) transmission, and uses predictive scheduling and coordination to regulate and optimize bandwidth use on the limited upstream return channel while preventing dangerous bandwidth spikes.

“With the volume of data sent from the set-top box including viewership data and diagnostic information, Velox is a critical technology in collecting this information in a timely, reliable manner. The result is a complete, usable dataset that can benefit all television stakeholders,” said FourthWall chief scientist and co-founder Dr. Louis Slothouber, in a statement.

FourthWall Media has introduced Precision Diagnostics, a tool for cable operators that’s designed to reduce customer service calls and truck rolls by monitoring physical plant and detecting problems in advance of service disruptions.

To make the tool go, the company's MassiveData division is expanding the return path data collected from millions of set-top boxes to include deep diagnostics that report on the health of devices and the cable network itself.

“The market for cable system diagnostic data and reporting for set-top boxes is underserved as many operators have either limited access to diagnostic data or the tools to analyze it,” Charlie Barnes, FourthWall’s SVP, product strategy and management, FourthWall Media, said. “The cost of an on-site truck roll for a cable customer is considerable, as is every customer support call,” he added, noting that the platform can flag problems before customer disruptions and give MSOs an opportunity to take remedial action.

The Precision Diagnostics product provides key set-top box and plant information in areas such as model information, frequency and signal levels, DVR health, VOD service information, and crash and reset status.

Precision Diagnostics is slated for release in January 2015.

FourthWall Media, a company that specializes in interactive apps and set-top box viewing data, said the U.S. Patent Office has approved a patent for a system and method that ties into the vendor’s Ad Widgets interactive advertising platform.

The company said the technology allows cable operators or other distributors of interactive TV ads to deploy new interactive ad units reliably while eliminating the need to test each individual interactive spot. In turn, it enables advertisers to choose from a variety of certified Ad Widgets that overlay interactivity on their commercial spots.

The technology itself is also built into an Ad Widgets Console that lets operators select from templates that allow them to tailor elements such as background color, messaging and graphics.

Functions enabled by the technology described in the patent include targeted billboard overlays, voting and polling, requests for information, and the ability to play longer form video, the company said.

FourthWall said it has 16 patents granted and 79 pending.