NEW BERN, N.C.—Wheatstone recently received certification of its core streaming software from Nielsen for inserting the ratings firm’s Portable People Meter (PPM) encoded watermark, and now that capability is available to broadcasters from their streams and in the cloud.
Wheatstone’s Layers Stream, a full suite of software for streaming from an on-premise service or a cloud data center, now supports the watermark as does the company’s Streamblade and Wheatstream AoIP streaming appliances, the company said.
Whether streamed from a Wheatstone appliance, an on-prem server or in an AWS cloud data center streams can be counted separately or tallied with on-air listenership to attract advertising buys.
“In the case of Wheatstone, we’re integrating the encoding right there in processing software rather than running it through a hardware encoder after the fact,” said Nielsen product manager Eric Kmetz. "It's a much better way to operationalize it."
Having the Nielsen encoder certified as part of the Wheatstone processing chain gives broadcasters confidence that their station will be measured by Nielsen, said Wheatstone senior product development engineer Jeff Keith.
Wheatstone and Nielsen engineering teams completed the certification process in January after extensive testing for quality and error detection of both audio content and the watermark being streamed through Wheatstone processing software, the company said.
More information is available on the company’s website.
