TiVo Snaps Up Ad Research Firm TRA

TiVo, the DVR player that first united catch-up TV and the Web in holy matrimony, has just purchased ad research firm TRA for about $20 million.
TRA enables advertisers and networks to measure the effectiveness of their ads on TV, enabling ad folk to gain insight on, say, which networks are best for selling cookies versus cars.
“We believe television is at an inflection point,” said TiVo President Tom Rogers to the New York Times. “In the digital realm you measure click by click and get increasingly granular information. This kind of metric has not developed well in the television space before now,” he added.
Not for want of trying. Companies like Bluefin, for example, are attempting to improve real-time TV analytics by measuring things like social activity during a show, as well as during given ads.






