Television audience measurement method and apparatus

Abstract

Television transmissions are received at multiple locations across a large area. Advertisements are identified, harvested and tagged from within in the television transmissions. The advertisements are made into smaller representations (“fingerprinted”) and are assigned identifiers and media plans are determined for the advertisements. Smart TVs use the advertisement representations to identify advertisements in television content received by the smart TVs. The smart TVs report the advertisement identifiers and identifiers of shows in the television content received by the smart TVs. The television content and advertisements as rendered by the smart TVs are categorized as live, timeshifted, on-demand, over-the-top, and the like. The advertisements are categorized as occurring in national or regional ad slots. The data from the smart TVs is used to determine ad impressions, gross rating points, and target rating points.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A method of measuring an audience for advertisements executed on a computer comprising a memory, which method comprises the following steps:
 determining a media plan for a first advertisement;   receiving a set of viewing data from and related to a set of smart TVs, the set of viewing data comprising smart TV identifiers and, with respect to content rendered by the smart TVs, show identifiers, and advertisement identifiers;   categorizing whether the content rendered by the smart TVs was at least one of live, timeshifted, on-demand, and over-the-top;   categorizing insertion instances of the first advertisement in the content rendered by the smart TVs as being at least one of national, regional, and dynamic; and   for the first advertisement, determining ad impression volume according to the media plan, the set of viewing data, and the categorizations.