Orion
Scalable audience measurement for connected television
By capturing viewing behaviour directly from connected televisions and set-top boxes, Orion provides the detailed return-path data needed to complement established audience measurement panels, improving the granularity and reliability of audience estimates.Unlike systems that continuously collect data from every available device, Orion enables reporting to be dynamically controlled at the household level.
This allows measurement organisations to select the households that best support their measurement methodologies, controlling data collection costs while improving the efficiency of downstream data fusion and helping to minimise sampling bias.Designed to work alongside existing audience measurement systems, Orion provides a scalable and flexible foundation for transforming television usage data into valuable audience insights.
Data quality, representativeness and control
Large volumes of return-path data do not automatically translate into representative audience measurement. Differences in device ownership, connectivity and viewing behaviour can introduce bias into the reporting population.
Orion provides measurement organisations with control over which households contribute data, allowing them to implement selection strategies that support their statistical requirements.
Rather than treating every connected household as equally valuable, Orion enables a more targeted approach to data collection, helping measurement organisations manage representativeness, cost and measurement quality.
Adaptive reporting populations
Audience measurement is not static. As reference panels evolve, audience behaviour changes and new measurement requirements emerge, the optimal population of reporting households may also change.
Orion enables reporting populations to be updated dynamically, allowing measurement organisations to refine household selection without requiring a wholesale change to the underlying data collection infrastructure.
This flexibility supports ongoing measurement calibration and the introduction of new audience measurement methodologies.
Key functions
- Ad Selection and Targeting: Opportune determines which ad to serve to a viewer based on factors like user demographics, location, device type, current programming and other contextual signals.
- Ad Replacement Decisioning: Opportune determines if a selected replacement ad is of higher value over the original default ad within an ad spot.
- Frequency Capping, Spacing and Copy Rotation: Opportune can limit how often and how many times a particular viewer sees the same ad, preventing ad fatigue and ensuring a positive user experience. Opportune can rotate through different ad copy for a campaign, supporting the campaign narrative.
- Compliance and Filtering: Opportune ensures ads meet regulatory and channel guidelines, such as avoiding inappropriate ads for the programming content or advertiser brand conflicts with replaced ads and unreplaced default ads
- Integration with Ad Networks and DSPs: Opportune can be integrated alongside Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), and ad exchanges to facilitate ad delivery in a seamless, automated way.
- Bid Evaluation and Auctioning: Opportune can be integrated into bidding environments, it evaluates bids from multiple advertisers for each available ad spot and selects the winning ad based on predefined criteria (e.g. highest bid or relevance).
Key features
- Granular viewing data: Collect detailed return-path data from connected devices, providing insights into channel, programme and advertising consumption to support more accurate audience measurement.
- Panel enhancement: Supply granular viewing data to complement representative audience panels, supporting improved measurement accuracy, particularly for smaller audiences and advertising spots with limited panel observations.
- HbbTV integration: Leverage BCi Digital's Otter HbbTV application technology to collect viewing events and engagement data from compatible connected televisions.
- Dynamic household selection: Control which households contribute viewing data, enabling measurement organisations to target reporting towards households that best support their measurement methodologies and adapt the reporting population as requirements evolve.
- Cost-efficient data collection: Balance measurement requirements with operational costs by limiting data transmission, storage and processing to selected households, rather than continuously collecting data from every available device.
- Supporting representative measurement: Enable carefully designed household selection strategies that support efficient downstream data fusion, improve coverage of specific audience segments and help minimise the introduction of sampling bias.
- Granular reporting: Deliver detailed viewing information to external measurement systems, supporting analysis of viewing behaviour and downstream calculation of reach, frequency, audience distribution and advertising performance.
- Scalable architecture: Cloud-native processing designed to accommodate large volumes of viewing events from extensive connected-device populations, with flexible control over reporting volumes.
- Privacy and consent: Support consent-aware data collection, pseudonymisation and appropriate data governance to meet deployment-specific privacy requirements.
- Flexible integration: Connect with existing audience measurement systems, data processing platforms and reporting services through configurable interfaces, supporting established measurement methodologies without replacing them.
Use cases
- Enhancing audience measurement panels: Supplement representative audience panels with granular return-path data from connected devices. Support more accurate measurement of smaller channels, programmes and advertising spots where panel sample sizes can limit reporting. Dynamically select reporting households to support efficient data fusion, improve representativeness and minimise sampling bias.
- Broadcaster audience intelligence: Provide broadcasters with more detailed and timely insights into how audiences consume their services. Understand viewing patterns, analyse programme performance and support more informed scheduling and distribution decisions. Control data collection volumes to balance the granularity of audience insights with operational costs.
- Advertising measurement: Provide detailed viewing and advertising exposure data across linear and addressable television. Enable external measurement systems to deliver more granular reach and frequency analysis, campaign reporting and reconciliation between traditional and addressable advertising, including for smaller audience segments where panel-based measurement can be challenging.
- Cost-efficient and adaptive audience measurement: Optimise return-path data collection by dynamically selecting the households that contribute viewing information, rather than continuously collecting data from every connected device. Adapt reporting populations as audience panels and measurement requirements evolve, controlling transmission and processing costs while supporting representative measurement and efficient downstream data fusion.
Other BCi Digital products
Turn audience data into actionable insights
Unlock the value of television return-path data with a more intelligent approach to audience measurement. Orion gives broadcasters, platform operators and audience measurement organisations the flexibility to collect granular viewing data from selected households, balancing measurement quality, representativeness and operational costs. Contact BCi Digital to explore how Orion can support your audience measurement strategy.