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Welcome

TRAC Media Services is the nation's leading public television audience research firm, setting the standard for objective and insightful audience analysis. The company began with custom research and consulting for stations in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s TRAC moved into Nielsen ratings analysis and in the mid-1990s pledge services were added. Today we are expanding into online audience analysis. Through our research we have become experts on all aspects of public television programming and viewership.

TRAC understands the mission, goals and relationships in public media. Through years of quantitative and qualitative research, Listening Projects and pledge programming studies, TRAC has collaborated with stations to translate research-ese into actionable information. TRAC can tell you why loyal viewers stop watching, pledging and renewing and, what affects and motivates individual attitudes towards local stations. TRAC has the experience, the acumen and the data to help a station turn its mission into community support, help a producer turn a simple video into a national success, or help a distributor become an invaluable partner to stations.

Our clients are PBS stations, producers, and distributors who want to know more about public television audience, public television membership and pledge, media trends and community engagement.

Local Programming Initiative

TRAC Media proposes to develop a new tool for local success . . . The Local Programming Initiative.

From TRAC’s extensive research on program audiences it was clear that some of the most popular programs were local in origin. Further, there was not one genre of popular local programming but rather a repertoire of different types. Our many studies of public television audiences also demonstrated that the most successful stations in the system tended have very popular local programming.

TRAC’s Local Program Initiative (LPI) emerged as an effort to identify successful local programming that can be replicated at stations across the system. The project is multifaceted in providing audience analysis, benchmarking measures, format analysis and staff training.

More information can be found at the links below.

Project Description and Detailed Deliverables

Paper 1: Local Programs by Design

Paper 2: In Search of Bright Spots

If your station would like to participate in this project please contact Craig Reed (520-545-0908 or craig@tracmedia.com).

Announcements & Events

The latest Scheduling Assistant docs are located at the ptpa website.

PTPA has a new website: ptpa.tv

Join your programming colleagues at their Annual Spring PTPA Meeting which will begin the evening of May 13th, 2012 at 6:00 p.m. with the Programmer of the Year Award Dinner and meet all day on May 14th, 2012 in Denver, Colorado at the Sheraton Denver Downtown. Click here for more details.

Note: Due to overwhelming registration response, PTPA meeting registration will close on Friday, April 20th.


Calendar of Events