An architecture for real time television audience measurement

Currently, audience measurement reports of television programs are only available after a significant period of time, for example as a daily report. This paper proposes an architecture for real time measurement of television audience. Real time measurement can give channel owners and advertisers important information that can positively impact their business. We show that television viewership can be captured by set top box devices which detect the channel logo and transmit the viewership data to a server over internet. The server processes the viewership data and displays it in real time on a web-based dashboard. In addition, it has facility to display charts of hourly and location-wise viewership trends and online TRP (Television Rating Points) reports. The server infrastructure consists of in-memory database, reporting and charting libraries and J2EE based application server.