Barb Taps MetaBroadcast and Nielsen's Gracenote to Optimize TV Audience Measurement in UK

Gracenote programme metadata and content IDs delivered through the MetaBroadcast active data platform broaden Barb's coverage, speed ratings reporting 

LONDON, Dec. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- MetaBroadcast, the UK's leading metadata management specialist, and Gracenote, a Nielsen company, announced today that it has been awarded a three year contract renewal by Barb, the UK audience measurement service, to operate its combined content ID and genre allocation system from January 2025.

MetaBroadcast will now use industry-leading Gracenote schedule metadata and unique content identifiers to reduce timescales for accurate programme identification, validation, enrichment and genre classification, as well as improve coverage and accuracy of broadcaster IDs. The inclusion of Gracenote will also allow Barb to better deduplicate content and accelerate reporting from seven days to three days after programmes are first made available on linear channels or streaming services.

"MetaBroadcast is delighted to continue supporting Barb by leveraging the robust metadata management capabilities of Atlas, our cloud-based active data platform, and by now working with premier global metadata provider Gracenote to improve content ID coverage and classification," said Jamie Mackinlay, CEO, MetaBroadcast. "We recognise the importance of accurate, consistent, and timely programme data that allows Barb to fulfill the needs of its audience measurement customer base. We look forward to continuing our collaboration."

"By leveraging Gracenote's unique content IDs and programme metadata, measurement providers can quickly identify and better understand what people are watching across different services and platforms," said Tim Cutting, Chief Revenue Officer at Gracenote. "We look forward to working with MetaBroadcast and enabling Barb to deliver new levels of speed, accuracy, consistency and completeness in their multi-screen audience measurement."

Barb's audience measurement relies on a world-class system for identifying and classifying traditional linear broadcast, catch up or streaming viewing. Using best-in-class Gracenote data as a key system input will ensure consistent programme titles and genres, accurate connections between programmes and episodes and linkages to broadcasters' linear and streaming content across platforms.

About MetaBroadcast

MetaBroadcast is the leading data specialist facilitating the management and delivery of high-integrity descriptive metadata powering content discovery, viewer engagement and audience measurement solutions. Founded in 2007, MetaBroadcast is headquartered in London, UK; the company has ingested metadata from over 150 different sources; serves 70+ broadcasters and 310+ channels, and manages over 140M content records and billions of transactions.

About Gracenote

Gracenote is the content data business unit of Nielsen providing entertainment metadata, connected IDs and related offerings to the world's leading creators, distributors and platforms. Gracenote enables advanced content navigation and discovery capabilities helping individuals easily connect to the TV shows, movies, music, podcasts and sports they love while delivering powerful content analytics making complex business decisions simpler.

About Barb

Barb is the industry's standard for understanding what people watch.

Our hybrid approach integrates people-based panel data with census-level online viewing data. Our methodology enables us to deliver inclusive measurement of total identified viewing across all broadcast, VOD and video-sharing platforms, delivered onto and consumed via multiple platforms and devices.

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