The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), a division of the Advertising Research Foundation, this morning said it is launching new research to "better understand how time is spent across every platform available on TVs today."

The initiative, dubbed the "Passive TV Measurement Study," will explicitly look at how American consumers spend time with linear TV as well as OTT (over-the-top internet-connected) devices, smart TV apps and video game consoles.

CIMM said the study will be conducted in partnership with HyphaMetrics, and will utilize its "multi-layered methodology," which includes active and passive measurement in combination with machine learning in order to understand consumer media behavior when they are present in a room.

"The methodology can be used to assign person-level demographics to machine-level TV exposure datasets, such as those from smart TV and Set-Top-Box (STB) Data," CIMM said in a statement, adding: "While many in the TV industry are moving to the use of scaled granular TV datasets, calibration panels such as those utilized by HyphaMetrics can enable adjustment for data missing in these datasets."

The pilot test, which will be conducted over the next few months, will utilize a panel of 100 households.

“The industry has long sought to know, in real-time, who is watching what and in what format are they watching,” CIMM CEO and Managing Director Jane Clarke noted, adding: “With HyphaMetrics, we hope to establish the validity between the meter-detected person presence and the ‘in-the-moment’ source of truth from the phone survey to identify what TVs were on, what was being watched and which household members were in the room with TVs on.”