Arbitron Adopts Lariat Solution for Audience Measurement

The Arbitron Company has entered into a strategic alliance with streaming media infrastructure company Lariat Software Inc. to power its new InfoStream Webcast audience ratings service.

Under the agreement, Lariat will license its MediaReports software to Arbitron for use in the collection of data from streaming media servers for the InfoStream ratings.

"This partnership is a strategic effort to create state-of-the art measurement technology and services that further the advancement and adoption of streaming media," said Andrew Fry, chief executive officer and chief strategist at Lariat. "Together, Lariat and Arbitron will deliver objective information to advertisers that rely upon fact-based data when investing their critical advertising dollars in this new, yet powerful high-growth medium."

InfoStream was created to satisfy the need in the streaming media industry for third-party audience measurement to demonstrate the value of their audiences to agencies and advertisers. InfoStream is a server-side measurement system that captures a near census of Internet tuning sessions from streamed media channels measured by Arbitron.

MediaReports 2.0, which shipped in June, enables providers to collect data from streaming media log files to evaluate services, monitor and report on audience traffic, and accurately bill advertisers and content providers for appropriate usage.