Using speech recognition and closed captioning, a company called Multivision Inc scans 1,000 TV channels for certain keyword, such as the name of a company. Clients can buy “buzz reports” to determine how much media they received. “Our goal is to watch every television station in the country,” said CEO Babak Farahi.

By lost remote via Umediated.

An article in the Contra Times reports reports how politicians, businesses and other organizations are using the service, to keep track of how often they are in the news, where the stories appear and how well their public relations departments are doing in shaping their images. Marketing vice president Brent Bamberger likens Multivision’s services to a combination of the search engine Google and the television recording system TiVo — a kind of search engine for television.