Samba TV – the social TV analytics platform founded by Ashwin Navin, former COO and co-founder of BitTorrent – formed a handful of smart TV app partnerships with Sony and Toshiba a year ago, but has remained fairly quiet since. Now, it is announcing the release of a real-time visualization and analytics product to measure TV viewership.
The company has set up cable boxes across North America allowing it to monitor every TV channel, while simultaneously measuring social media and connected devices. The composite is a ranking of the top trending shows at any moment. Not only is a real-time trending platform helpful for consumers wanting to know what to tune into at any time, but also it is extremely helpful to networks and advertisers.
“Samba TV can help marketers specifically identify which of their tune-in marketing activities performs best at driving tune-in,” Ashwin told us. “We call it VTR (Verified Tune-in Rate) and we can measure every media vendor the marketer has available, including the in-house promotions. Our customers get these VTR reports from us, which helps them allocate media spend effectively to the highest performing vendors.”
More tune-in means more advertising revenue, and advertisers can also use Samba to better quantify the impact – whether it is visits to a website, visits to a store, or even purchases of a product – of ad exposure. The data used can also inform how they advertise across second screen devices.
“Advertisers can extend their TV commercials onto phones, PCs and tablets,” Ashwin said. “We can amplify across 120 million “second screen” devices and we can do it for live and time-shifted content. No other second screen ad technology can do that, and with Samba, advertisers don’t need to rely on the audience to tweet, like, or use a hashtag to amplify their TV messages on any secondary device.”
Samba TV raised a $8.5 million Series A round in January 2012 and expects to announce its next round of funding within six months. The company holds a patent for cross-screen synchronization, and it will be interesting to see how the company continues to tie together viewership with advertising effectiveness across devices.