Watching users’ faces, eyes to understand TV habits
Company uses Xbox camera to analyze interests, attention
While Ellen Milz and her family were watching the Olympics last summer, their TV was watching them.
Milz, 48, who lives with her husband and three children in Chicago, had agreed to be a panelist for a company called TVision Insights, which monitored her viewing habits — and whether her eyes flicked down to her phone during the commercials, whether she was smiling or frowning — through a device on top of her TV.
“The marketing company said, ‘We’re going to ask you to put this device in your home, connect it to your TV and they’re going to watch you for the Olympics to see how you like it, what sports, your expression, who’s around,’ ” she said. “And I said, ‘Whatever, I have nothing to hide.’ ”
Milz acknowledged that she had initially found the idea odd, but that those qualms had faded.
“It’s out of sight, out of mind,” she said, comparing it to the Nest security cameras in her home. She said she had initially received $60 for participating and an additional $230 after four to six months.
TVision — which has worked with the Weather Channel, NBC and the Disney ABC Television Group — is one of several companies that have entered living rooms in recent years.
The appeal of this information has soared as Americans change their viewing habits, streaming an increasing number of shows.
Through the installation of a Microsoft Kinect device, normally used for Xbox video games, on top of participants’ TVs, TVision tracks the movement of people’s eyes in relation to the television. The device’s sensors can record minute shifts for all the people in the room. The company then matches those viewing patterns to specific shows and commercials using technology that listens to what is being broadcast on the TV.
“The big thing for TV advertisers and the networks is: Are you actually looking at the screen or not?” said Dan Schiffman, chief revenue officer of TVision.
Companies spend around $69 billion per year on TV ads in the United States and are keen to find out how to best distribute that money. Nielsen and its panel of 42,500 households have long determined how money is spent on TV advertising in the United States.
Some industry executives have criticized Nielsen’s methods as outdated. Nielsen selects homes at random to represent the nation’s viewing audience, and measures who is watching what shows, mostly through meters connected to the sets, as well as diaries and tracking of certain adsupported programs on tablets and phones.
“Nielsen will remain the currency for the time being because it is agreed upon as the thing everyone uses,” said Alan Wurtzel, an adviser at NBCUniversal. “But as the world becomes more complex, as it is, many more additional supplemental or complementary measures will come into play.”
Information gathered by companies like TVision can help advertisers steer marketing toward shows with the most engaged audiences, not just the largest ones. And for networks, it could make a show with a committed and loyal audience as valuable as one that attracts a larger but more casual set of viewers.
TVision has recruited 2,000 households, or roughly 7,500 people, in the Boston, Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth areas. The company said the information was transmitted without storing images or video and collected anonymously.
Schiffman said the data would show, for example, “Person No. 124 in Household 6 was paying attention this second and not paying attention the next to a certain program or advertisement.”
Still, privacy can be a concern. This month, Vizio, one of the biggest makers of internet-connected televisions, said it would pay $2.2 million to settle charges that it had been collecting and selling viewing data from millions of smart TVs without the knowledge or consent of the sets’ owners.
By measuring the level of attention a person is paying to a given show, TVision believes it can help bolster niche programs and smaller networks. For example, Schiffman said the company had found that the series Lucifer ,on Fox, commanded better attention metrics from viewers than The Big Bang Theory, on CBS, even though Big Bang is one of the TV shows rated highest by Nielsen.
“People don’t just tune into Lucifer. They DVR it and watch it when they come home,” he said, adding that viewers tend to be focused on the show and stay in the room when it is on.