Measurement company iSpot.TV acquired Tunity, which gets data on out-of-home TV viewing through an app that enables people to listen to muted sets in venues including bars, offices and health clubs.

iSpot said it acquired the Tel Aviv-based company, which previously raised $16 million, for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. It is the third acquisition in 14 months for iSpot, described by NBCUniversal as a leader in the race to be an alternative to Nielsen for providing cross-platform measurement.

Also: The Front-Runner: How iSpot Became a Favorite To Claim Nielsen’s Measurement Crown

“Our vision is really being able to measure TV no matter how it’s delivered, no matter what screen it’s on, no matter what channel and this really completes the picture for us,” said Sean Muller, CEO of iSpot told Broadcasting+Cable.

iSpot has been working with Tunity on its work measuring NBCU programming, including the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

According to Paul Lindstrom, a former Nielsen research executive now head of research and analytics for Tunity, television hasn’t had good out-of-home viewing data till Tunity came along.

Nielsen measures out-of-home viewing with meters that pick up the audio from TV programming. Lindstrom said Nielsen’s meters can’t register viewing if set are on mute or if there is a lot of ambient noise, as is often the case in crowded locations. Nielsen has deployed meters in only 44 markets and much of the viewing its meters do pick up is actually guest viewing by people in other people’s homes,” he said.

Nielsen Out-of-Home Error Was a Big Deal: VAB

“Audio is a fundamentally flawed method for doing out of home,” Lindstrom said.

With Tunity, people have chosen to listen to the audio for channels they want to watch. To tune in, they use their smartphone to take a video of the TV screen they’re watching. The app can use that video and location data from the device to verify where the viewing is taking place. It also picks up commercials that are both watched and listened to.

Lindstrom said that viewing patterns on Tunity show peaks during key moments in sports programming or event shows. The patterns are consistent enough that Lindstrom said it is possible to forecast Nielsen in-home ratings based on Tunity’s out-of-home metrics.

“There’s no reason to think than people who have the Tunity app are going to choose to view differently than other people,” he said. It’s a very good and representative group.” 

Lindstrom added that Tunity has picked up viewing from inside the White House.

Muller said that iSpot will be investing to increase the number of Tunity app users to more than its current 2 million viewers. The app is free to use, and the company generates revenue by selling its data and analytics.

“We’re going to invest in integrating their analytics into our products,” he said. The Tunity backend has already been integrated into the iSpot infrastructure.. By third-quarter it will be included in iSpot’s measurement, currency and attribution products.

Muller said iSpot is already close to doing its first deal with a network for out-of-home measurement.

iSpot will be adding Tunity’s 10 employees and its Tel Aviv location will become iSpot’s first international office.

Lindstrom will become VP of research and analytics for iSpot. Initially he will focus on out-of-home, but “he’s going to contribute pretty broadly to the company,” Muller said.

“We’re going to be investing in this capability. We think it is a really good one and the industry needs it,” he said. ■

Super Bowl LVI was watched by 150 million people on TV and streaming platforms, according to iSpot.TV, a measurement company being used as an alternative to Nielsen by NBCUniversal.

The game had an average minute audience of 121 million viewers, with 56% of U.S. households watching all or some of the telecast on NBC, Telemundo and Peacock.

iSpot's average audience numbers beat Nielsen's calculation of an average audience of 101.1 million viewers. Last year’s game had an average audience of 91.6 million viewers on CBS, according to Nielsen. Adding in viewers on other platforms raised the Nielsen count of the game a year ago to 96.4 million.

Also: Super Bowl Draws More Than 101 Million Viewers: Nielsen

Linear viewership of Super Bowl LVI averaged 98.1 million viewers per minute, according to iSpot, with total in-home reach of 134.5 million on NBCU networks. NBC had 131.6 million viewers and Telemundo added 2.9 million viewers.

Streaming averaged 10.5 million viewers per minute, and 15.5 million total viewers. iSpot worked with Conviva to get sensor level data about connected TV, mobile and tablet consumption.

Also: Men Paid More Attention to Super Bowl Ads Than to the Game: TVision

The out-of-home average audience for the Super Bowl was 12.5 million, as measured by Tunity Analytics, another iSpot partner.

The average Super Bowl ad reached 106 million viewers. The game generated 4.39 billion verified household ad impressions across all platforms in 216 minutes.

Working with iSpot, NBC and its advertisers are getting data about the commercials that usually aren’t available for weeks.

Also: Super Bowl Commercial Prices Increase 5%, SMI Reports

During the game, the commercial attention rate was 36% higher than the average across all networks and shows on Sunday. The commercial completion rate was 98.6%. 

Viewership peaked during the halftime show featuring hip-hop legends Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and Eminem, getting a 12% bump.

Ads running during the halftime show generated an average audience of 116.8 million verified impressions for in-home viewing.

Also: NBCU Puts iSpot in Lead as It Evaluates Measurement Companies

The NFL’s animated two-minute commercial during the halftime show had the highest in-home audience, seen by 19 million viewers.

NBC is also broadcasting the Olympics and over the course of all of Sunday, NBCU-owned networks accounted for 69% of all household ad impressions for the day, iSpot.TV said.

Another data company, Samba TV, said that 36 million U.S. households watched the Super Bowl, up 12% from last year. 

“In Q4 of 2021, every one of the top five television programs was an NFL game, and that momentum helped linear TV notch its first ratings increase since 2020,” said Cole Strain, head of measurement for Samba TV. “We saw that same momentum and excitement for the NFL carry over to this year’s match-up between the Rams and the Bengals, with the NFL continuing its ratings winning streak gaining Super Bowl viewership year over year by 12%, reaching 36 million households.”

Samba also found the game’s halftime show to be a big audience draw, watched by 29 million households, up 19% from last year.

“The powerhouse performances from Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and 50 Cent rocked the ratings on Sunday night, shattering last year’s halftime audience drawing in millions of more viewers across both linear television and streaming,” said Strain. ■ 

Tunity, a startup that has built an app that lets users hear live audio streams from muted televisions, has hired two execs who are late of Nielsen and MGM.

Bruce Tuchman is on board as president of sales, and Paul Lindstrom has been named head of research. They are joining Tunity on the heels of its $12 million "A" round.

Tuchman, a vet of the media and entertainment industries, has previously been president of AMC Global & Sundance Channel Global, president of MGM Worldwide Networks, and GM of Nickelodeon Global Network Ventures. 

Lindstrom is a long-time Nielsen exec who helped to design and develop a range of tools, systems, studies, and measurements for new media outlets, and directed sales, operations and strategy for Nielsen Strategic Media Research and Nielsen On Location. At Tunity, he’ll head up the creation of new data products and help the company develop a “new metric” based on Tunity’s traffic, tuning and attention data.

Both Tuchman and Lindstrom will be based in Tunity's New York City office.

Tunity says its app currently supports more than 100 channels in the U.S., including Fox, CBS, and ESPN.

Its app and cloud-based platform, targeted to consumers who are watching muted TVs in venues such as sports bars, airports, waiting rooms or gyms, streams a channel’s synced-up audio feed to the smartphone. Tunity also uses A.I. and deep learning techniques to determine the correct live TV channel and establish the video-audio synchronization.

RELATED: Tunity Tunes in Out-of-Home Viewing (subscription required)

Tunity founder Yaniv Davidson said recently that the company is experimenting with its business models and exploring future revenue opportunities, including some based on targeted advertising.

Tunity, a startup that has built a mobile app that lets users hear live audio streams while viewing muted televisions, has snatched a sizable round of funding as it looks to pursue a business model based on providing key insights on out-of-home TV viewing, as well as targeted advertising opportunities.

Fresh off a $12 million A round — and a signed partnership with MGM Resorts — Tunity is now starting to fine tune its business plans, along with its mobile app and cloud-based platform; together, the app and platform enable consumers watching muted TVs in venues such as sports bars, airports, waiting rooms or gyms to stream a channel’s synced-up audio feed on their smartphones.

Tunity claims its app, available for Android and iOS mobile devices, has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. It currently supports more than 100 channels in the U.S., including ABC, AMC, Bravo, CBS, CNN, Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, ESPN and beIN Sports, among dozens of others.

To enable the video-audio synchronization, users of Tunity’s mobile app are directed to scan nearby TVs so its cloud-based deep learning technology can identify the live video stream and match it with the right audio feed, which is then streamed to the user’s smartphone.

Under this process, the scan from the user’s mobile phone sends that information, including a few captured video frames and the user’s location, to Tunity’s platform, which analyzes the images and the location to determine the correct live TV channel.

From there, it creates a system time stamp to ensure that the audio that’s streamed to the smartphone is synchronized as closely as possible to the video that users are viewing.

New Stamping Grounds
As for that deep-learning bit, Tunity uses all of this data to constantly “train” its servers to improve its time-stamping and synchronization capabilities.

Rather than one-off attempts at this synchronization, Tunity’s system has an historical database that, it claims, helps the system’s “neural network” become better over time on an almost linear basis, Yaniv Davidson, Tunity’s founder, explained. “The more data you have, the better your algorithm and the better that your neural network works,” he said.

Related: Big Data Getting Bigger Thanks to Mobile Apps, Report Says

Tunity’s location-based system (using the phone’s WiFi or cellular connection) is also in place to ensure that users are getting the audio when they are in front of or somehow nearby the TV, and can’t simply set the scan to receive the audio stream and then go on their merry way. If users move away from the TV (perhaps by as much as 100 to 160 meters), the audio stream is shut off and they are given a notice to rescan in order to restart it.

Tunity is experimenting with its business models and exploring future revenue opportunities.

Selling data and insight on out-of-home viewing to programmers and other partners is a model that it’s initially looking into.

For its part, Nielsen has acknowledged that out-of-home viewing provides a ratings lift, albeit one that varies by programming type, viewer demographic and age group. Recent data from Nielsen, for example, found that 26% of OOH impressions came from viewers 18-34, versus 32% from viewers 55 or older. However, nearly 60% of OOH impressions come from the core buying demographic, according to Nielsen.

“Out-of-home is going to become a more important part of linear TV,” Davidson said, hopeful that Tunity’s data can complement existing ratings systems or provide some additional second-by-second data to networks.

Tunity is also taking a look at how it can create targeted advertising that is relevant to what the viewer is watching.

Tunity conducted a small experiment during a televised NASCAR race where a native pop-up on the phone asked viewers if they wanted to pre-order the racing game NASCAR Heat Evolution. They could decline it or accept it. If accepted, they would be sent to a dedicated landing page to complete the pre-order process. Davidson said the experiment saw a 20% click-through rate.

Founded in 2014, Tunity has about 20 employees, with offices in New York and Israel.

Tunity, a startup that has built an app that lets users hear live audio streams from muted televisions, has secured a $12 million Series A round alongside a partnership with MGM Resorts.

A-round participants included existing investors, such as John Mack, former Morgan Stanley CEO, and Adam Neumann, Founder and CEO of WeWork, as well as MGM Resorts International.

Tunity said its platform -- helpful to consumers who are watching TVs outside the home in venues such as sports bars, airports, waiting rooms, hospitals and gyms, and for networks that eager to get a better fix on on-the-go viewing -- currently works with more than 100 channels in the U.S., including Fox, CBS and ESPN.

Tunity claimed that its app, available on Google Play and Apple’s app store, has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times.

Under the strategic partnership, MGM Resorts will use Tunity’s patented technology to “enhance their guest’s experience” by enabling them to hear any TV on its properties using the Tunity mobile app.

Tunity said its mobile app enables users to scan nearby TVs and uses the company’s cloud-based deep learning and Computer Vision technology to identify the live video stream and sync up the video’s timing with the audio, which is streamed to the user’s smartphone.

“With more than 20% of Americans watching television outside of the home, today’s announcement brings us one step closer to transforming the way consumers interact with live programming they want to watch but can’t hear,” Yaniv Davidson, Tunity’s founder, said in a statement. “Measuring these out-of-home audiences has tremendous value to brands and the networks. Extracting Tunity’s unique data insights will provide better understanding of viewing habits, and lead to more effective ad buying decisions.”