Inscape’s Ken Norcross On Measuring OTA, And Inscape’s Tuner Data Product

In this interview from CES 2024, Ken Norcross, VP of Data Licensing and Strategy at VIZIO Inscape, helps us understand why measuring OTA TV is important, and how Inscape’s Tuner Data product is uniquely positioned to measure.

Ken Norcross: Over the air is what most of us think about as "old school bunny ears", or when you have an antenna attached to your TV to receive free content that's being broadcast from broadcast stations – typically local channels in the specific market. Surprisingly to most, it's a growing marketplace, and over 18% of US homes are accessing their content through OTA on a monthly basis. Before the release of our current [Inscape] product, there really wasn't a good way to measure over the air viewing outside of surveys or a panel-based approach. Now, with the release of our Tuner Data product, we're actually using our technology across 23 million smart TVs to integrate that viewing into our data set and deliver it to our clients for measurement. 

What is the value of VIZIO's streaming API?

The streaming API is a technology we developed for publishers on our platform to feed the information back to Inscape so we can understand the content and ads being consumed within the app on our TV. We use that to then validate against our ACR technology to spread a holistic picture of what's happening across our TVs for that publisher specifically.

How does Inscape work with programmers?

So we work with programmers on a custom basis. We help them understand their content being distributed across our entire platform ecosystem. So whether it's on linear TV through cable satellite, whether it's OTA broadcast, if it's their owned and operated platform, or they're distributing content to a FAST environment… getting an understanding and a singular view of how that content performs has really never been done before. And we are in a unique position because of the OEM factor and that we see the behavior across apps, linear, as well as OTA – that we can provide that singular view to them of how their content is performing across all these various touchpoints.