Accurately measuring audience behaviour across today’s multiple media platforms has been the bugbear of the TV business for many years now, but Numeris has announced it is one step closer to a made-in-Canada solution.

The company, which is the primary provider of TV ratings data to the Canadian industry, announced Thursday that it has approval from its board to proceed with implementation of Video Audience Measurement (VAM), a new tool to measure cross-platform video viewing “on an unduplicated basis.”

The company has been working with partners Kantar and ComScore, as well as with the industry, to advance a new tool that will reflect multiple-device tune-in. The plan was first announced last fall.

“Now, we’re going to be able to say how many people watched [a show] on their mobile, how many people watched it on their tablet, how many people watched it holistically in the non-linear space,” said Neil McEneaney, Numeris president and CEO. 

While understanding how many people are watching a TV series (or game, or whatever), and in what manner they are doing so, is a valuable piece of information for producers, it is critical for the advertisers and agencies that buy video advertising. Online advertising, for instance, is very easy to track and as such, has drawn more dollars away from traditional media outlets, like TV and newspapers.

The hope is that a clearer understanding of viewership can enhance ROI for advertisers and allow them to better utilize video ad inventory. Or said more simply, create better strategies for ad placement and volume based on how people are seeing them.

The company will start building panels of participants this fall, and to start analyzing the data this spring.