Tribune Sells Gracenote to Nielsen for $560 Million

Tribune Media Co agreed to sell Gracenote, which provides media and entertainment metadata, to Nielsen for $560 million.

Gracenote provides reference information for more than 12 million movie and television listings and 200 million music tracks. It is the industry standard for automatic content recognition technology. Combining Gracenote with its measurement framework, Nielsen expects to be able to provide clients with deeper analytics on consumer behavior and offer a better view of audience engagements. “Gracenote’s metadata and content recognition technology fuels the interfaces of the major video, music and in-car infotainment systems that consumers engage with every day. This acquisition provides Nielsen with a significant asset in our mission of measuring and understanding consumer behavior,” said Karthik Rao, president, Expanded Verticals at Nielsen. Tribune acquired Gracenote in 2014. Tribune Media expects to receive approximately $500 million in after-tax proceeds from the transaction, the majority of which will be used to repay existing debt with the remainder to be reinvested in the business. The sale is expected to close during the first quarter of 2017.