What’s your name and position within the organisation?
David Ives, Founder & CEO of TVEyes.
Tell us about TVEyes
TVEyes is headquartered in Fairfield CT America, with a major operations centre in Manchester UK. The Company was founded in 1999 and is privately owned. A team of 35 professionals, many having been with the Company for over 10 years, have developed and implemented proprietary technology to automate the capture and supply of broadcast media content.
Exploiting the technology as a service provider, TVEyes has grown to become the global leader in broadcast monitoring, capturing in real time content from over 2,500 Radio and TV stations worldwide and supplying all major international media companies through partnership agreements plus direct sales in the US home market.
TVEyes employs state of the art speech to text software provided by its ownership of TVEyes Language Technology, and in partnership with Pervoice, companies based in Trento Italy. Highly accurate speech to text transcripts together with the accompanying audio/video help to deliver a full record of all programme content. The TVEyes speech recognition software now supports 29 languages including many variations of English as spoken worldwide
Until last year clients were those mainly requiring news reporting, thus Governments, major corporations, PR companies and Associations. Politics have also represented an important user base, for example over 40 account holders in the White House plus US and UK political parties. “I want to know what has been said, I want to know now”. Real time reporting plus full archive access provide measurement by timely analysis.
From a dominant market position and a fully integrated service offering TVEyes has now significantly enlarged its media monitoring capability with coverage of You Tube, Podcasts and the implementation of logo detection. This major step is enabling the Company to focus on specific markets, clearly Sport and related Sponsorship coverage represent an area of prime investment.
In the US the Company has a small specialised sales force with services used by such existing clients in the sports market as NFL. MLS and NASCAR.
Again, historically this has mainly been for news reporting, now with the help of our clients the services are being increased to deliver all needs through a single platform.
Why is TVEyes so different?
TVEyes commands a unique global position in being the only company to provide a comprehensive range of media monitoring services. From mention of an event, athlete name or sponsor on mainstream media, the ability to track social media pick up by You Tube and Podcast coverage supported by full logo recognition results
Measurement without limitations. Use of advanced AI learning systems unencumbered by restrictions of manual labour allow total 24×7 coverage of each individual channel. The proprietary systems are based on unlimited keyword or Boolean search terms thereby increasing the range and scope in the recognition of sponsor words. Within the same platform the addition of logo recognition software means monitoring is no longer a standalone operation. The system is highly flexible allowing detailed frames per second coverage of specific events together with full coverage by run or programme. Evidence of existing usage in the US has shown that Sponsor name mentions and logo display have increased exponentially separate from pick up in a specific event; for example:
The TVEyes logo detection and reporting capability was demonstrated for Under Armour’s sponsorship of Tom Brady during his appearance at Capital One’s “The Match: Champions for Charity,” held on May 24, 2020. Post-event coverage of Tom Brady on ESPN. Over the course of the broadcast, the Under Armour logo was detected 62 times on Brady from shirt to shoes. Nielsen reported that 5.8 million people watched the golf event live on TNT, TBS, Tru TV, and HLN. TVEyes also tracked the term “Tom Brady” in its Media Monitoring Service network of more than 2,200 stations worldwide for 48 hours after the event. On Sunday, “Tom Brady” was mentioned 1,800 times and on Monday there were more than 5,600 mentions. Each mention shows theaccompanying video and most of these show Brady’s “shot of the match” and the Under Armour logo on his shirt..
Current Trends
TVEyes does not offer or provide any editorial or analysis services, this work is best performed by our clients and partners, experts in their field. The company will continue to focus on two main areas. Firstly, the extension of both country coverage and allied language support. This includes the immediate roll out to monitor channels in Singapore and S.E Asia, together with full coverage of UK and European sports channels.
Secondly the TVEyes system is a prime source of Big Data through its mass of content collection. It allows all users to employ the tools provided to download all direct and competitive information for import into their own reporting. Such tools include for example heat maps, time scale mentions, audience measurement figures and for logo recognition very detailed CSV reports.
It will continue to be important that TVEyes operates within any necessary broadcaster licences, indeed it is a fact that many broadcasters are themselves clients of the Company.
COVID 19
TVEyes as a technology company has been able to implement 100% home working operations. Although the capture network is managed remotely use of Independent Service Providers the service remains as a fully automated process.
On the plus side, core business for the Company has increased with the requirement for management of crisis reporting and the impact of Covid 19 on breaking news, fortunately no need to furlough staff
Ad Monitoring
And finally, in the US TVEyes is now heavily engaged in ad monitoring including visual recognition as well as pre tagged content. This then completes the total coverage and fulfilment of Radio and TV content by spoken word, logos and ads. The Company has also been granted a patent for hash tag detection, again providing the ability to track broadcast follow up through social media
Future Trends
The period of Covid 19 has seen a marked decline in newspaper purchasing and readership habits. Digital media including Broadcast has been increasingly used for updating information and time shifted consumption of content. TVEyes believes this trend will continue and therefore it will be well placed to provide exposure and consumption of sport data.