Whether you are working home these next months and going on a lunch break or a weekend warrior on a staycation we have some things that will have your heart sizzling. Recently going over programming on Vizio made me realize it’s simply crazy good.

Welcome to our weekly snapshot of TV by the numbers, highlighting the most-watched shows and networks for May 22-28, with insights from Inscape, the currency-grade smart TV ACR data provider and data technology division of Vizio. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).

Built on this core dataset, Inscape developed Commercial Feed+ to deliver innovative streaming TV commercial coverage. Inscape’s new Commercial Feed+ leverages additional sources of Ad creatives and layers in ad detections beyond ACR, which increases commercial exposure visibility across multiple viewing sources.

Inscape has launched Commercial Feed+, an enhanced and expanded commercial dataset that places an emphasis on streaming. Commercial Feed+ is aimed at helping the industry better understand ad effectiveness and the impact of TV commercial exposures in a holistic approach, across linear and streaming platforms.

Vizio followed an increasingly familiar trend in the first quarter, as lower device demand resulted in a steep 40% year over year decline for hardware revenue, while as the smart TV maker enjoyed 24% revenue growth for its expanding ad business – boosted by increased usage on its streaming platform. Vizio shipped 900,000 TV sets in the period, a 32% drop.

This dataset, built on Inscape’s automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, expands TV commercial coverage and visibility across both linear and streaming platforms by incorporating more sources of commercial detections, including as-run logs, ad server integrations and streaming commercial ingestion.

TVREV: Tell us about your journey and what made you decide to join Madhive?

Jon Kaplan: Throughout my career I’ve looked for opportunities to build categories at the earliest stages of their evolution and then see their growth through to scale. I see some of the same opportunities at Madhive that I saw at Google, Pinterest and FalconX to teach the industry something new.

Inscape has launched Commercial Feed+, an enhanced and expanded commercial dataset that places an emphasis on streaming. Commercial Feed+ is aimed at helping the industry better understand ad effectiveness and the impact of TV commercial exposures in a holistic approach, across linear and streaming platforms.

Vizio’s ads business leans heavily on automatic content recognition (ACR). But that alone isn’t enough to help marketers plan campaigns across channels.

“With the writers strike and everything, there wasn’t a whole lot of excitement about the upfronts this year,” said Alan Wolk, co-founder of TV(R)EV, a media consulting business.

Television’s biggest mystery is when viewers will be able to see new mysteries on television.

“Smothered,” directed by Carlyle King, and distributed by Revry, will be available on streaming channels including Revry, Amazon, Apple TV, DirecTV, Peacock, and more starting May 12, 2023.

Madhive, the leading technology company engineered for modern TV advertising, announced today that Jon Kaplan has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer. In this new position, Kaplan is responsible for accelerating the adoption of Madhive’s full-stack TV enterprise software, empowering TV buyers to capitalize on the streaming era with a programmatic solution.

Introducing what Inscape, the provider of “currency-grade” ACR data and the technology division of VIZIO Holding Corp., calls “an enhanced and expanded commercial dataset that places an emphasis on streaming.”

Inscape may be well-known for its automatic content recognition technology (that underpins the current Commercial Feed product), which is considered “glass-level” tech and can detect ads and content on the screen across sources.

“Once Netflix and Disney and all of them get their ad product up and running,” Wolk said, “the big advertisers who’ve been hesitant to spend money on streaming because it’s still mostly reruns are going to go, ‘Oh, I get it. Netflix, that’s the new primetime, FAST is the new cable. This is how I’ll spend the money.’”

Ad tech company Madhive said it hired Jon Kaplan as chief revenue officer, a new position at the company.

Most recently CRO at FalconX, Kaplan spent six years at Pinterest and 12 years with Google.

International producer, distributor and channel operator, Blue Ant Media is to launch FAST channels Homeful and Love Pets on Vizio WatchFree+ in the US.

To encourage new consumers to embrace the smart TV ecosystem, new connected TV equipment-focused company Telly is now prepared to give away 500,000 free TVs in the U.S.

How are they doing this? Selling advertising, of course. But not entirely in the way other TV set manufacturers like Samsung, LG, or Vizio are doing with their internal smart TV platforms

Another keynote speaker is Charbel Makhoul, general manager, VP of product, data science and analytics at Vizio, one of the first TV set makers to harness and license automated content recognition data.

The new Commercial Feed+ layers in other sources of commercial advertising detection beyond ACR, such as linear TV “logs” and streaming ad-server logs.

Key for many marketers is that the new service deduplicates commercial exposures across linear and streaming.