Simplestream, the leader in live, live-2-VOD and on-demand OTT services, announced today that it has now integrated BARB’s new Dovetail audience measurement across its delivery platforms. This enables participating broadcasters and operators to more accurately measure reach across multiple devices to better understand their audience and potentially increase advertising, carriage and subscription revenues.

“By supporting BARB’s Dovetail measurement solution, we can enable our customers to better measure full viewership and reach in the UK market, however and wherever content is viewed,” said Dan Finch, Chief Commercial Officer of Simplestream. “The combination of this data with our cost-effective, flexible and leading time-to-market solutions, means that UK broadcasters looking to deploy streaming and OTT services have a more compelling reason than ever to deploy our Simplestream platforms.”  

Project Dovetail was established to deliver total reach of programme and commercial audiences across multiple screens. BARB’s method for achieving this relies on two high-quality data sets:

• BARB’s panel of 5,300 homes delivers representative viewing information that includes programme and campaign reach, demographic viewing profiles and measurement of viewers per screen.
• BARB collects device-based data whenever anyone in the UK watches a BVOD service on a tablet, PC or smartphone. These data provide a census-level measure of what’s been watched and for how long.

These two sources are combined using a process called Dovetail Fusion. This delivers multiple-screen viewing figures that presently reports programme average audiences – which collates multiple-screen programme audience figures for all individuals across four screens: TV sets, tablets, PCs and smartphones. BARB plan to develop new Dovetail functionality to include reach and time spent viewing on TV sets, smartphones, tablets and PC and viewing of broadcaster VOD services.

About Simplestream

Simplestream, a London-headquartered company, is the leader in live, live-2-VOD and on-demand TV services across all OTT platforms. Founded in 2010, Simplestream enables broadcasters, platform operators, content owners and distributors to quickly launch next generation TV services, increasing reach and revenues. Simplestream provides a simplified workflow and cloud-based solutions to industry leaders, including A+E Networks, News Corp, Sony, MTG and QVC.