I work in the advertising industry (media buy side) and we buy the feed from VideoAmp (Vizio) to determine linear TV spot reach better than Nielsen. We only bu

I work in the advertising industry (media buy side) and we buy the feed from VideoAmp (Vizio) to determine linear TV spot reach better than Nielsen. We only buy for our clients and get a feed of only their placements, but essentially VideoAmp knows how many Vizio TV’s are online in every zip code and from that can with a fairly high confidence interval give a statistical accurate determination of what played on TV. Most media includes ACR (auto content recognition) fingerprints for this purpose, either through VideoAmp or Comscore (comcast set top boxes). The whole game for them is for you to get your “Smart TV” online and they entice with apps and now tons of shovelware-esq free TV channels like PlutoTV.