Buyer’s Guide:

Keep An Eye Out for
These Broadcast Monitoring Services

by Lindsey Wyckoff, Staff Writer

Summary: Broadcast media monitoring services are discussed and four major vendors are reviewed: LuceOnline, News IQ, TVEyes, and VMS (Video Monitoring Service).

Print and online media are long lasting; after publication they are archived and available for use. But for broadcast media there is no permanence unless the story is captured on tape or transcript. Transcripts and tapes are useful, but having real-time access to the information is key, and that is what broadcast monitoring services provide.

Some broadcast monitoring services rely on actual human monitoring of what is broadcast, while others offer automated monitoring of closed caption clips. Either way, the information is "clipped" (just as it is in print), archived and sent to you. When choosing a vendor, consideration should be given to the market you plan to monitor, as well as the monitoring and delivery methods you prefer. There are many vendors available; O’Dwyer’s offers an extensive list on their Web site. The frontrunners in the field are LuceOnline, News IQ, TVEyes, and VMS (Video Monitoring Service). These are discussed below, to give you a good idea of the technologies available.

Broadcast monitoring technology:
Closed caption monitoring under fire.

One of the major issues in broadcast monitoring today is the technology that performs the monitoring. Are you better off with automation based on closed captions? Or human eyes and ears? Or emerging technologies such as speech recognition software?

Many consider closed caption monitoring to be an unreliable medium, because it is not as widely used or as accurate as it needs to be. Typos can cause a myriad of mistakes and misses. Regulations to expand closed captioning over the past few years should help to expand the market considerably. By 2006, the FCC has mandated that 95% of new broadcasts will be closed captioned (check out WGBH Caption Center for an explanation of the FCC mandates and what they mean).

Unfortunately, FCC regulations notwithstanding, closed captions are not widely available. Questions have also arisen as to whether closed captions are subject to copyright infringement. Most vendors who use closed captions for their broadcast monitoring include a disclaimer about the medium. Others think that it is a more reliable source than just a person watching television, even if that is their job.

Speech recognition seems to be a viable solution to carry broadcast monitoring to the next level, automating the process without relying on closed captions. Another aspect to consider is what market you need monitored. If your coverage is primarily local, you may be able to find a vendor in your area that focuses on local television and radio monitoring, such as Albuquerque Media Monitoring. However, as with any clipping or monitoring service, it is generally best to choose a vendor with the most comprehensive coverage out there. After all, you may discover that your name, keyword, brand or whatever you are monitoring has expanded further than you expected.

LUCE Online

LUCE has recently expanded their clipping and monitoring division to include television. Together with multivision, inc., LUCE provides a Broadcast Service that monitors over 700 channels, including cable networks. They specialize in obscure markets and coverage. Getting started is free; you can set up and change words in your keyword manager at no charge before monitoring begins. Alerts are delivered to you each morning that include the name, date, network and time of the broadcast, as well as the blurb surrounding your keyword (or, if you choose, the full text of the segment). The cost is $495 monthly to monitor 3 keywords and receive sentence reports. If you opt for full text reports, the cost is $895 per month. Additional search criteria are $50. If you decide to, you can purchase the segment on video, DVD or online using their digital delivery system. In April 2002, multivision inc. was the first broadcast monitoring service to offer DVD delivery to its clients (a 1-10 minute segment on DVD costs $245).

NewsIQ

Medialink offers the broadcast monitoring service NewsIQ. As the name suggests, NewsIQ is an internet-based monitoring system for TV news, covering more than 50 major national markets. Closed captions are monitored automatically and you are notified via email when keywords are mentioned. There are two options for notification reports: they can be delivered either when the clip is captured or on a scheduled basis. Reports include the sentence your keyword appears in as well as the date, time, program name, market and station it originally aired on. The service is run on a subscription basis and costs $795 per month for unlimited reports. If the tracking report does not suffice, you can request a video clip or a transcript of the program at additional cost. The monthly subscription fee provides access to a database of TV news transcripts, which is easily searchable and user-friendly.

TVEyes

“Always Watching” is the tag line for TVEyes. What makes TVEyes unique is the free basic service they offer. All you need is an email address and a password in order to have access to your own keyword management center, where you can add and delete keywords to be monitored. You can also choose how many notifications you would like to receive (the free service offers three to ten). Because we are willing to try almost anything here at The Measurement Standard, we started our own personal account with a couple of choice keywords. It has been a week now and no results have been returned for “e-coli” or “New Hampshire primary,” two topics we thought might get a few mentions at least.

Beyond the free personal edition, TVEyes offers a GOLD edition that allows for unlimited keywords and alerts for $49.95 per year, and a professional edition that tracks both real-time and archived television content, and can support more complex Boolean strings as keywords. TVEyes’ alert system, InstantAlerts, sends reports in the manner you choose (email, instant message or wireless messaging), whenever your keyword is mentioned on TV or the radio.

While TVEyes GOLD provides an expanded version of their basic service, there are a variety of add-ons to the Professional Edition, such as PinPoint Video and FasTrans Editor. PinPoint Video works in conjunction with InstantAlerts and includes a link embedded in the alert that connects to a streaming video clip of the segment with the keyword. You can search for clusters of keywords that interest you or monitor a more focused aspect of a company (such as stock quotes only). Archives of video and transcript can be accessed using PowerSearch. Other technologies such as FasTrans Editor enable users to edit and create their own transcripts. Currently, TVEyes monitors closed captions, but RadioEars (one of their newest products) uses speech recognition to encode and index speech from any audio source. TVEyes also offers a Broadcast Edition for broadcasting professionals and a Political Edition. Depending on your needs and the add-ons you choose, the monthly price for TVEyes Professional starts at $5,000.

VMS

VMS, a partner of media powerhouse Burrelle’s, is thought to hold the current title of the world’s leading media monitoring service. Their services are separated into advertising and public relations sectors. Our focus here is on the public relations services, but they also have some notable advertising services as well as a huge database of advertisements at their disposal. VMS records over 60,000 hours of broadcast news every month, and they maintain a database of 1.5 million news stories. They monitor an extensive amount of national and international coverage, including news networks such as CNN, CNBC and MSNBC. They also monitor PBS, as well as specialty cable channels such as The Learning Channel, the Food Network, Comedy Central and VH1, in over 100 top markets worldwide. They are one of the only services with extensive international monitoring capabilities. When you sign up with VMS, you are teamed with a personal account representative who sets up a personal profile of your keywords and information at no charge. The monitoring process is not automated, programs are monitored in real time, by real people. The monitoring reports cost $10 per hit. And fees are on a pay-per-clip basis, depending on the market and the length of the segment. A 6-minute video segment in a network, cable or local VMS market costs $125 plus delivery. They can be delivered as videos, audiocassettes, transcripts or digitally encoded tapes. Prices are a little high, but there are relatively few misses and you have the human factor to up the ante, as most services still tend to rely on closed captioning.

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