Commercials You Actually Enjoy? How TVision Insights Is Inverting An Old Industry Standard
Rough Draft is excited to introduce the TVision Insights team to the family! TVision started as an idea that began to take shape throughout Bill Aulet’s New Enterprises course at MIT Sloan. Yan Liu, who took this course the second semester of his first year began to socialize the idea with fellow Sloan classmate Dan Schiffman, and they both decided to pursue the business full time once they graduated.
Prior to TVision, Liu held roles at at McKinsey & Company, and Quantcast, and additionally co-founded a digital marketing agency in Shanghai. Schiffman maintained a variety of roles ranging from engineer at a VOD software company, manager at a leading SaaS company, and CEO of an eCommerce company. He has 3 patents in Computer Vision, and began his career at the age of 15, becoming Cisco certified and starting a full-service web hosting company in his mother’s basement.
With TVision, Liu and Schiffman are looking to more accurately measure the impact of television advertisements, a $70 billion market that has lacked innovation in decades. Currently, Nielsen gathers data from families that sign in each time they sit down to watch, indicating who, what, and when is watching. However, there is no way to determine variables such as when the television is left on with no one watching, second screen viewing, distractions, and more.
TVision uses computer vision technology to gather information about a viewers’ demographics, emotions, actual viewing habits, and content engagement. Data is collected by sensors placed in the living room which collect and analyze data on a second-by-second basis. TVision is looking to sell this information to advertisers and media planning agencies to help inform their ad spending, and to networks who can gain deep knowledge about their audience. As television advertisements continue to migrate to a programmatic platform, deeper insight into audience behavior becomes a necessity and TVision hopes to be that insight provider.
To date, the company has filed multiple patents in the U.S. with a few more in process. As of July 2015, they have seen an MRR of 31,250, with a 53% growth rate.
Congrats on the big launch TVision team — we’re looking forward to seeing your impact in our very own living rooms!
