Nielsen Kicking Gracenote’s Tires?

Nielsen is in advanced talks to acquire Emeryville, CA-based media data specialist Gracenote from Tribune Media. That’s the word from Variety, which cites multiple unnamed sources. Talks have apparently progressed so well that an official announcement could come as early as this month. One source pegged the price tag somewhere in the neighborhood of $450 to $500 million. Variety says Nielsen is primarily interested in Gracenote’s automatic content recognition technology, which has been integrated into TVs from major manufacturers. This technology would allow Nielsen to more accurately measure what consumers are watching, and possibly even offer a window into measuring the performance of online video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

Nielsen’s interest in Gracenote has primarily been spurred by its automatic content recognition technology, which allows to identify video from multiple sources through video fingerprints — short snippets of identifying data that are compared with a master database maintained by Gracenote, which initially developed this type of content recognition for mobile devices, but has since also directly integrated it into the TV sets of multiple manufacturers. Nielsen has dabbled with automated content recognition in the past as well, but has yet to gain direct access to consumers’ TV sets.

Adding this capability would allow Nielsen to measure media consumption with much larger sample sizes, and potentially even offer insights into how shows on Netflix and other streaming services are doing. However, some of this data may be protected by deals struck between streaming providers, TV manufacturers and Gracenote. It’s not clear whether or not this technology would be adaptable for Nielsen Audio’s radio measurement purposes.