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May 15, 2013

Television Ratings Company Moves on Analytics

Isaac Lopez

Ratings company, Rentrak, says that they have moved on an analytic platform to help solve the problem of having a large amount of data, but not enough data scientists to make use of it.

A lack of adequate human resources being a common trend in big data, Rentrak says that it has turned to the Alteryx Strategic Analytics platform to provide their business analysts with tools to access and use the data to help their advertising clients better understand consumer behaviors.

As a television ratings measurement company, Rentrak collects a massive amount of granular information on television viewer habits for all 210 of America’s media markets, incorporating information from over 24 million televisions.

The company aims to help its clients (who are television advertisers) to identify patterns and trends in television viewership that will help them identify new customers, and hold on to existing ones through the analysis of the huge amounts of data that are coming into their servers.

One of the key challenges that Rentrak says they face is that while they have a lot of tasks that involve large data, they don’t have enough of the end user with the technical knowledge of ETL, statistical programming, etc. to access and process the data to turn it into usable insights.

David Algranati, SVP Product Innovation & Custom Research says that the platform is enabling them to empower their business people to gain insights from their data. “What Alteryx has allowed us to do is to distribute [big data related labor] to a variety of analysts and end-users who don’t have background in an ETL tool or a stat package or a programming language, but they understand the tasks, they understand the business rationale behind the tasks, and now Alteryx lets them take that domain expertise and create a solution for our clients.”

Earlier this month, Alteryx announced that it is releasing a free project edition of its platform that they say enables analysts to build, iterate, and deploy and analytic workflow application utilizing any data source, and leveraging their Strategic Analytics 8.5 platform. The project edition is a sort of “taste test” for business analysts, allowing data to be run up to 15 times for a given project.

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