TVB Selects IBM Social Media Analytics on Cloud to Gain Insight into Audience Sentiment

HONG KONG, May 15, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB, SEHK:0511) is adopting IBM's cloud-based Social Media Analytics technology to greatly increase insight into audience attitudes expressed through comments posted across a wide range of social networks and online forums. This will enable the company to better understand the impact of its programming and monitor its reputation as a Hong Kong TV broadcast license holder.

TVB is the first company in Hong Kong to use IBM Social Media Analytics, which is capable of analyzing billions of publicly available social media comments and providing the results in configurable, easy-to-understand charts and dashboards. By generating predictive analysis and actionable intelligence, TVB is positioning itself to drive greater value from its marketing campaigns, discover new opportunities and proactively address problems.

Established in 1967, TVB is Hong Kong's leading television station. It provides five free entertainment and news channels, and a pay TV service that offers subscribers over 40 local and international channels to Hong Kong viewers. It has also expanded its business beyond Hong Kong since the 1970s, delivering service and programs through different channels and in diverse formats to Mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, North and South America, and Europe.

As TV viewing expands into digital and new media platforms, TVB launched its web service myTV in 2008 and the myTV mobile app in 2011, both with great success. Earlier this year, TVB also launched its pay view-on-demand GOTV service. All of these online efforts aim to extend content outside of the home, in particular, for the younger generation who are used to watching what they want, at anytime and on any device.

Using IBM Social Media Analytics, TVB will also deploy IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration on IBM POWER Systems together with IBM Cognos software, to mine more than three decades of program ratings data and unearth correlations between this data and social media "buzz." This will enable TVB management to understand the trends of media consumption habits. 

Social media data, when combined with internal criteria and traditional performance metrics, will provide rich insights about the market that can be gleaned for smarter decision making.  In addition, the cloud-based delivery option will allow TVB to quickly reap benefits regardless of any capacity constraints.

"The new integrated data warehouse and social media analytics platform has huge implications for audience research and our commercial strategy going forward. While traditional TV ratings research will continue to be important, it must be augmented by social media intelligence," said KC Leung, senior manager, Marketing Research & Information Department, Television Broadcasts Limited. "The solutions that IBM is delivering will enable TVB to fully embrace this and become more precise, agile and responsive to the opinions of our audience and needs of our advertisers. Social media analytics will also be a very useful enhancement to our on-going process of stakeholder engagement."

"Our Social Media Analytics solution helps TVB go way beyond mere social media listening," said Samson Tai, IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief technologist, Innovation Network, IBM Hong Kong. "Being able to capture and analyze all of this consumer data means TVB can act on newly discovered insights to understand viewership behavior and sentiment and more effectively manage its online reputation."

The new data warehouse is built on IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration, a technology that speeds analytics and reporting through next generation in-memory columnar processing and provides an extremely efficient way to find relevant data. The data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) system will enable TVB to fully leverage its archive of rating data, pulling in social media data to find correlations that – in the age of on-line, on-demand video consumption – is going to become a very important part of the commercial proposition for TVB.

About TVB
Television Broadcasts Limited, commonly known as TVB, was established in 1967 and is the first wireless commercial television station in Hong Kong. With its headquarters in Hong Kong, TVB provides round-the-clock entertainment channels and news service to over 7 million Hong Kong viewers, and operates an international licensing and distribution business. Today, TVB has over 4,600 staff and artistes worldwide. For more information visit: http://corporate.tvb.com/

About IBM Big Data and Analytics
IBM has established the world's deepest portfolio of Big Data and Analytics technologies and solutions, spanning services, software, research and hardware. Today, more than 400 IBM mathematicians and 6,000 industry solution business partners are helping clients use big data to transform their organizations. Additionally, IBM secured 1,500 Big Data and Analytics-related patents in 2013 alone, and continues to engage and build solutions and skills across a broad community of 1,000 university partnerships, 135,000 Big Data University enrollments and a worldwide network of nine Analytic Solutions Centers.

For more information about IBM Big Data & Analytics, visit http://ibm.co/bigdataanalytics and http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/.

Follow IBM Big Data & Analytics on Twitter @IBMbigdata and @IBMAnalytics.

For more insights on Big Data & Analytics visit IBM's Smarter Planet blog.

About IBM
For more information about IBM Hong Kong, go to: www.ibm.com/hk

Media Contact(s):
Florence Ma
IBM China/Hong Kong Limited External Relations
Tel: (852) 2825 7626
Email: [email protected]

Hanna Smigala
IBM U.S. Media Relations
Tel: 1 (203) 720-342-5343
Email: [email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO

SOURCE IBM