News Articles

TVEyes can monitor television news

Thursday, November 20, 2003

By ALEJANDRA NAVARRO anavarro@ctpost.com

FAIRFIELD

Most professionals can't keep up with all of the news broadcast on television 24 hours a day.

David Ives built a company that can.

Fairfield-based TVEyes.com uses a computer program to monitor television and radio broadcasts, said Ives, president and chief executive officer of the company founded in 1999.

People who want to know about a particular product, person or issue can set up an alert. When the subject comes up on TV or the radio, the company sends a message to the subscriber by email, instant message, or to a cell phone. Subscribers can read the text and watch and listen to the video and audio feed of the program on the Web. A subscriber can see the broadcasts from over the past 90 days, he said.

The service has grown popular with government and corporate professionals who need to be current on what is being said in the media, Ives said.

"We are able to do it 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he said.

A company or a political campaign couldn't justify spending the money to monitor all of the news that's available on television.

David Ives, of TVEyes on the Post Road in Fairfield, stops to watch a few minutes of Al-Jazeera news being monitored for a client.

About 100,000 people have signed up for TVEyes.com offers a free service, which allows a person to have up to three keywords or phrase searches.

Ives is now converting some of those users into paying subscribers. He said he has more than 200 paying clients, whose service fees range from $300 to $800 a month.

Mike Shanahan, spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute and a TVEyes.com client, said he keeps close tabs on news about the oil industry.

"This allows us to know what the broadcast coverage is on a wide variety of issues important to the industry," he said.

More companies are moving to electronic monitoring, said Kevin Repka, president of Buffalo-based Newstrax and president of the International Association of Broadcast Monitors, which has about 100 members.

"TVEyes is on the cutting edge," said Repka, whose company hires people to monitor local news organizations.

Ives, who worked as a software design consultant for 20 years, saw the growing need for companies to monitor television. He designed a computer program that monitors broadcasts for keywords; transfers voice to text; saves images and video, and immediately shoots off a message to the client. The company licenses language converter software for clients monitoring international stations, such as Arabic television station Al-Jazeera.

Currently, TVEyes.com monitors about 25 television and radio stations, but can begin monitoring a specific station with a few hours notice, Ives said. The company plans to expand monitoring to the country's top 25 media markets by the end of 2004, he said.

TVEyes.com also offers analysis tools, such as graphs that can compare how often subjects are addressed in television media.

Ives said he expects the technology to become popular with the general public.

"In 10 years, this technology will be available by remote control from your television," he said.

Alejandra Navarro, who covers business, can be reached at 330-6324.