[March 03, 2015]

Women, Host Neil Patrick Harris Big Winners in Media Exposure During 87th Annual Academy Awards Program

Behind all the glamor and glitz of the 2015 Oscars, women were a major driver of on-screen content during the 87^th annual Academy Awards program, according to video analytics research insights from Vu Digital, pioneers in turning video to data.

Breaking down all 18,094 frames of Oscar content, Vu Digital analyzed and identified more than 24,000 separate pieces of data from the program, including text on the screen, spoken words and phrases, objects, brands and faces. More than 3,200 phrases were spoken on stage (a phrase is a sentence, or a sentence fragment), and more than 4,000 words appeared on the screen throughout the night.

This is the first time that Vu Digital has used its technology to conduct a study around the Oscars, although the firm's technology is built specifically to execute this type of research since they use an algorithm that recognizes, identifies and measures every discernible object, face, sound, word and brand that appears on screen.

Who benefited the most from the Oscars?

• Host Neil Patrick Harris was on screen for a whopping 13 minutes. That's a $51 million gig (time on screen multiplied by $2 million for 30 seconds of ad time).
• Actress Octavia Spencer, who wasn't nominated for anything, was a huge winner with nearly $6 million in exposure, as she played along with Harris around jokes about his winner predictions, which ran the course of the show.
• Seven of the top ten winners were women. Maybe Patricia Arquette has a point. Women are the driving force behind much of Hollywood's success this year, and are certainly deserving of the fruits of their labor. But if you look at it on the flip-side, the amount of screen time they received during the event suggests that women are getting the screen time they deserve.

You'd expect winners and presenters to be on the list, but not too far down the list are a couple of unusual suspects who occupied neither role.

• Actor Jack Black, who did neither, got 34 seconds of air time valued at $2 million.
• PricewaterhouseCoopers (News - Alert), the Academy's official auditing and tabulation firm, was mentioned or seen for more than 15 seconds, more than Hollywood stars Jason Bateman, Keira Knightley, Jessica Chastain and Matthew McConaughey.

Methodology:

This is data automated through computer vision (CV). At times a computer will see something completely different from a human's vision, so using this kind of analytics is more objective and less biased. Just because NPH is in a distant shot standing on the stage doesn't mean that CV will see him that way. From that distance, he's just a 'person.'

** This data was obtained from Vu Digital's video-to-data technology that turns video into data. For a full report of data from Vu Digital, contact [email protected].

About Vu Digital

Vu Digital, LLC was formed in 2013 as a technology company committed to delivering new and innovative solutions for digital content. Vu's Video-to-Data (V2D) product converts video to data using face recognition, object recognition, brand recognition, music identification, and automated speech recognition. Vu's algorithms and the use of an advanced architecture for distributing jobs for processing are patent pending and are one-of-a-kind in the marketplace.

The core technology includes splitting a video into two components, audio and video frames. Both components are then processed using ASR, text extraction from images, facial recognition and image recognition. The output is metadata that includes time stamped references to individual frames. With this technological approach, video classification/clustering, search engine indexing, and personalization for content, including targeted advertising are possible.

Vu Digital is headquartered in Ridgeland, Mississippi, and is an affiliate of C Spire, a diversified telecommunications and technology services company that offers consumers and businesses a suite of mobile broadband, fixed ultra-fast broadband, voice, data and cloud products and services.

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