HyphaMetrics, an independent media measurement company, was issued a U.S. patent for its next-generation cross-platform measurement system.
Patent No. 10,932,002 covers the company’s unique coreMeter hardware, its methodology for collecting data from all media sources in a household, and how the company determines individuals’ media consumption within a household.
HyphaMetrics’ system “can facilitate the measurement of everything occurring in someone’s home. We’re able to measure across all the walled gardens, across all the various silos,” said CEO and co-founder Joanna Drews. “What that produces is a true cross-platform single-source metric.”
The patent will enable HyphaMedia to deploy a “complete proprietary measurement system that is absolutely going to solve for a lot of the Holy Grail issues about omni-channel, cross-screen person-level measurement that the entire industry has been debating and asking for for a very long time," said Mike Bologna, the long-time advanced advertising head at GroupM who joined HyphaMetrics as chief revenue officer last year.
Drews was director of product management and emerging assets at Comscore and a partner in GroupM’s research practice.
Large measurement companies including Nielsen and Comscore are working on their own cross-media measurement systems.
Drews sees HyphaMetrics as a compliment for those systems, rather than a replacement.
“All of those solutions are really great at scale. They lack the granularity and the definition that we provide,” she said, adding someday, Nielsen might be one of HyphaMetric’s customers.
HyphaMetrics is in pilot mode now, according to Bologna.
“We are about to launch a field trial,” he said, putting its coreMeter boxes into about 100 homes while working with a few select partners.” He did not name the partners.
Bologna noted that the boxes are costly and that it’s expensive to recruit panels. The company previously raised $2 million, but will be raising additional funds via an equity round of financing in order to continue growing.
A lot of measurement systems use audio content recognition or automatic content recognition to determine what’s being watched. HyphaMetrics' technology uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to read what’s on the screen, Drews said. Its boxes are attached to each TV in a household. The boxes also have a router that enabled them to determine what’s being watched on streaming devices.
The systems allow HyphaMetrics to determine co-viewing, viewing personas and household viewing, Drews said.
HyphaMetrics’ three products so far are ClearviewMetrics, which measures unduplicated viewing data at the individual level across every network, program, advertisement, product placement, streaming app, gaming environment for every single device in the household; ContentMetrics, which collects real time data about who is watching what content and in what format -- live, time-shifted, or streaming – on TVs within an entire household; and MobileMetrics, granular data which demonstrates time spent in apps, simultaneous app usage, multitasking metrics, and more across mobile media environments.
