Rentrak sizes up sticky programming

Audience measurement firm Rentrak, which late last year signed on to measure audience information related to AT&T's U-Verse TV programming, has developed a new viewer engagement index that relies on information collected from U-verse TV viewing data to tell carriers and content companies how engaging particular TV programs are. The index, called a "Stickiness Index" by Rentrak, is part of the Rentrak TV Essentials suite that AT&T agreed last year to co-market.

The index, according to Research magazine, uses anonymous viewer data to rank TV programs by the average percentage of how much of the program was viewed by U-verse TV viewers, divided by the average percentage viewed for all programs in the same time slot. Those rankings will feed the weekly index of the top 25 most engaging programs organized by duration--30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours.

Service providers have been obsessed with developing sticky services and applications for a while now, and a metric that shows how sticky a particular program is--or a particular channel--will be very useful information for TV advertisers, as well as the TV service providers that are trying to working more closely with those advertisers on the evolution of linear ad insertion and targeted, personalized advertising.

For more:
- Research magazine has this story

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Rentrak signed on last December U-Verse TV audience measurement