MMS, the Swedish TV research organisation, announces today that it has selected Nedstat for its unified webTV measurement service. The online video application Stream Sense™ will be implemented in the video players of Sweden's main broadcasters SVT, Modern Times , TV4 and Kanal5/ProSieben to provide comparable, transparent and quality-controlled webTV measurements. MMS will enrich the delivered results with meta-information and publish a comprehensive database on a per webTV-program level.
The decision to select Nedstat is the result of an extensive evaluation process. MMS invited four global web analytics companies to participate in their tender. Following various unprecedented, full-scale tests in 2009, the measurement codes of two shortlisted suppliers were implemented into the broadcasters' players. In a further test, MMS manually carried out extensive video viewing sequences and compared the event-level measurements to the actual properties of each sequence. The tests revealed that Nedstat’s measurement technique delivered the most accurate reports on viewing time, which is critical for the TV industry and the most challenging aspect to measure correctly.
"At MMS we set highest value on quality and transparency, and I am pleased to say that Nedstat has lived up to our expectations", says Pontus Bergdahl, CEO at MMS.
"We are very proud to provide media organisations and marketers across Sweden with a webTV currency they can trust and use to allocate their marketing budgets most effectively", says Gerben Boot, General Manager Nedstat Scandinavia. "We will measure all video streams including live and the complete viewing experience. This will give accurate numbers for all programs, large and small. Also we are already prepared to combine these absolute numbers with demographic data for detailed target group information."
Nedstat already works with MMS' Dutch equivalent SKO (Stichting KijkOnderzoek), performing the independent audience measurements of TV programs for SKO member channels on the internet. The results are reported alongside the existing SKO TV audience measurement figures providing a more complete view of program popularity and the behaviour of the Dutch viewer.
Pontus Bergdahl further says: "MMS copied and further developed SKO's measurement of streaming video in the Netherlands, and we owe a great deal to their pioneering work in this field. Also, Nedstat's experience from working with SKO is a significant extra value for MMS."
MMS is also exploring alternative routes for incorporating demographic target group information in the service, and over time to regularly fuse the webTV data with the traditional TV ratings.