The Bluefin Labs product is targeted at marketers, advertisers and brands who wish to analyze, understand and proactively react to how television audiences are responding to their content. The product helps answer one of the fundamental questions driving programming and ad creation: How truly engaging is this piece of media?
"We sift through the world’s social media streams in order to identify and analyze comments about TV shows and ads," says Deb Roy, Bluefin Labs co-founder and machine learning and artificial intelligence expert.
Roy's description simplifies the complex technology -- a result of more than 15 years of machine learning research at the MIT Media Lab -- running behind the Bluefin Labs product. He says the system watches the visual patterns of television content, listens to and processes what's being said in social media streams and then creates a link between the two.
Bluefin's approach is fundamentally different from the approach of entertainment services, like GetGlue or IntoNow, that explicitly measure viewer engagement through checkins or listening technology.
"These are exciting developments that will be a part of the new media landscape, but I think that kind of explicit action is more the equivalent of clicking on a piece of media -- that's going to add huge value in the data stream," says Roy on the entertainment checkin experience. He believes, however, that so long as users continue to use disparate platforms for responding to content, Bluefin Labs has a larger pool by which to measure viewer engagement. "If it's public," he says, "we can pick it up."
The MIT spin-off startup, founded by professors Roy and Michael Fleischman in the summer of 2008, signed on 10 top tier brands and advertisers during its late 2010 and early 2011 pilot period. The startup initially operated on a grant awarded by the National Science Foundation. It then closed an Angel round of financing in the Spring of 2010, and is announcing a $6 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures on Wednesday.
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