The Rentrak Corporation, is an audience measurement

Audience measurement

Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites...

 company based in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. As of June 2009, Bill Livek is the company's chief executive officer.

History

In 1977, the video distribution company National Video, Inc. was founded; four years later it began selling video store franchises. Eventually the company sold the National Video franchise assets and began to offer its Pay-Per-Transaction system to all video rental retailers. In 1988, the company changed its name to Rentrak Corporation to reflect its new focus, and went public. The company's fiscal 2011 revenue was $97.1 million up from $91.1 million the previous year. In 2009, the company bought Nielsen EDI for $15 million. Rentrak sought tax breaks from the state of Oregon

Oregon

Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...

 in 2010 when it planned to expand its headquarters at Cascade Station near the Portland airport

Portland International Airport

Portland International Airport is a joint civil-military airport and the largest airport in the U.S. state of Oregon, accounting for 90% of passenger travel and more than 95% of air cargo of the state. It is located within Portland's city limits just south of the Columbia River in Multnomah...

.

Audience measurement services

Rentrak tracks more than 65,000 film and video game properties from brick-and-mortar, online and kiosk channels, measuring over 1 billion transactions each year, including rental and sales data for VHS

VHS

The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....

, DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

s and video games, as well as over 35,000 theater screens in North America and 54 million set-top boxes.

To facilitate the leasing of VHS and DVDs, Rentrak fulfills the role of middleman for all but the largest video rental chains.