Critical Mention Strikes Licensing Partnership to Efficiently Distribute Al Jazeera Media Network's Channels into Global Business Intelligence Markets

NEW YORK, July 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Critical Mention, the global leader in real-time TV Intelligence, enabling many of the world's largest business intelligence and big data platforms to efficiently include breaking news and other broadcast content from around the globe into their subscription platforms, announced a partnership with Al Jazeera Media Network today.

The agreement extends to both direct subscribers of Critical Mention as well as the users of third-party media monitoring and business intelligence platforms that rely on the Critical Mention API.  Terms were not disclosed.

"With 70 bureaus around the world reaching 260 million households and a fast-growing presence on U.S. cable systems,  Al Jazeera reporters are covering the stories and issues that matter to the public and private sector," said Sean Morgan, founder and CEO of Critical Mention.  "The importance of this real-time content to public and private markets across the world is profound."

Today's Al Jazeera Media Network partnership comes as the global, broad-based multibillion-dollar business intelligence and big data marketplace is grappling with a lack of real-time broadcast content.

"Despite huge audience sizes and extended time spent by viewers consuming content, TV has been kept on the sidelines and virtually untapped in real-time intelligence applications," said Morgan. "Due to the mass infrastructure requirements to aggregate broadcast on a global scale and technical requirements to make it all searchable and distributable, the broadcast industry has never been able to effectively monetize the business intelligence markets as newspapers, magazines and newswires have been able to do, and business intelligence markets have never been able to leverage real-time broadcast data on a global scale to derive insights and drive real-time decisions."

Recent media consumption and ad-spend studies from Pew Research Center, McKinsey, and Marketcharts bolster the argument that TV is the most persuasive and pervasive mass medium.

With content partnerships in place with close to 300 of the most trusted TV and radio news brands across three continents, Critical Mention's API is driving a paradigm shift in the utility of broadcast in business intelligence and big data platforms while pioneering new opportunities for broadcasters, who gain clear visibility into usage across all platforms. Al Jazeera Media Network gains immediate distribution into the business intelligence markets. In addition to Critical Mention's direct client base, the Al Jazeera Media Network's broadcasts will gain immediate distribution to Critical Mention's channel partners in the media monitoring, lead gen, ad intelligence and general research markets that are licensing access through the Critical Mention API and AMQP low-latency feeds to add the TV medium into their platforms. These platforms receive either near-real-time or low-latency enhanced and expanded text feeds through the service with all video remaining on the Critical Mention cloud for viewing.

In the integration with Critical Mention, the Al Jazeera Media Network's properties are optimized through Critical Mention's content engine. All signals run through the Critical Mention speech-to-text network, making the content searchable by every spoken word in real time and providing other meaningful metadata including program title, estimated audience and ad equivalency. Subscribers to the Critical Mention platform also benefit from natural language processing of Al Jazeera content, exposing proper nouns and sentiment.

"We are pleased to partner with Critical Mention to extend the reach of Al Jazeera's award-winning editorial coverage into corporations, NGOs, government and other organizations," said Ehab Sahawneh, executive director, Marketing and Distribution.  "The wide adoption of the Critical Mention API by other business intelligence platforms simplifies and streamlines our efforts."

About Critical Mention

Critical Mention's global media capture infrastructure and services are transforming the utility of TV and Radio in the broad based business intelligence markets. Founded in 2002 in New York City, Critical Mention is a unit of privately held Critical Media, the leading broadcast intelligence and Services Company. For more information, visit http://www.criticalmention.com.

About The Al Jazeera Media Network

Al Jazeera was established in November 1996 as the first independent Arabic news channel in the world dedicated to providing comprehensive television news.  With the creation of new channels and services, Al Jazeera has established itself as an international media corporation. In March 2006, it was renamed the Al Jazeera Media Network. It is now one of the world's leading media corporations with more than 70 bureaus around the globe. Over 260 million households around the world have access to Al Jazeera programming daily. Visit www.aljazeera.com for more details.

SOURCE Critical Mention