BARB commissions Kantar Focal Meter for UK TV audience measurement

BARB commissions Kantar Focal Meter for deployment across UK Television Audience Measurement Panel

BARB, the UK television audience measurement currency, has commissioned Kantar, the world’s leading Television Audience Measurement (TAM) provider, to roll out its new Focal Meter router meter across all broadband homes on the UK’s TAM panel.

Focal Meter will measure viewing across four screens (TVs, smartphones, tablets and PCs) to IP-delivered video content from all broadcasters and complement the existing People Meter which measures linear and time-shifted content viewed on TV Sets.

Data collected using Focal Meter will allow BARB to introduce several major service enhancements to its Gold Standard currency:

• Collect viewing on smartphones by individual panellists for the first time and thus allow demographic profiling of this growing platform
• Provide greater insight into the 20% of TV Set viewing that is currently unidentified by enabling identification of aggregate level viewing to SVOD and other on-line video services
• Enable delineation of (Broadcaster) On Demand and online box set viewing and distinguish this from time-shifted Personal Video Recorder (PVR) viewing
• Significantly increase the total number of devices measured and reported on the panel

Kantar’s Focal Meter collects data by intercepting web traffic from all devices connected to the home router, preserving respondent privacy by only reporting data from a specified list of BVOD and other online video sites.

Richard Poustie, UK Managing Director of Audience Intelligence, Media Division, Kantar comments, “We are very excited and proud to have been commissioned by BARB to extend the scope of our measurement service on the world’s leading Television Audience Measurement panel. Amongst many other capabilities Focal Meter will significantly enhance the measurement of four-screen viewing and audience profiling by device type and introduce smartphone viewing for the first time.”

Kantar has already rolled out the Focal Meter in Finland and Norway and is in the processing of rolling it out in Canada, Italy and Russia in 2019 and 2020.