CSOL Is Turning Webcams Into Focus Groups In A $29.14 Billion Market
Every trailer, streaming series, and TV ad is made to move an audience, and before release the studio or brand behind it shows it to test viewers and asks what they thought. People are bad at reporting their own reactions, though, and a viewer who swears a scene held them may have stopped paying attention halfway through it. When those answers are wrong, the company paying for the content finds out after the money is spent, with a film that empties theaters or a campaign that fails to sell. China Solar & Clean Energy Solutions (OTCID: $CSOL), which plans to change its name to Alyze AI Inc., runs Alyze, an AI platform built to catch the problem before release by watching viewers' faces through a webcam and recording the second their attention drops.
The scientific alternative to a survey has been a lab, where viewers wear EEG caps and sit in front of eye trackers, and Alyze gets its read from the webcam a viewer already owns. Alyze has validated its deep-learning models against EEG, skin-response, and eye-tracking data, so a studio gets lab-checked results from an ordinary webcam. Without a lab, a studio can run one trailer past viewers in New York and London on the same day, picking audiences by country, gender, and age from its own customers or the Alyze panel. Alyze Studio is the version built for films, series, and trailers, aimed at the broadcasters and streamers that Ampere Analysis expects to spend $255 billion on content in 2026. Alyze Business serves brands and agencies in a content-driven ad market WPP Media projects at $720.2 billion in 2026, and with no lab to book, both can test every cut before it goes out.
A production company put Alyze to work before releasing a 22-minute short film, testing the film, its trailer, and two posters on 100 viewers across New York, California, London, and Birmingham. Asked to choose between the two posters, 62% of viewers picked the same one, even though their faces showed the same emotional response to both. Asked openly whether anything in the film confused them, 78% of viewers said no, but when the survey gave them specific options to pick from, more than half said something had. The faces also showed the film playing very differently by region, keeping West Coast viewers at a high emotional pitch for more than nine minutes of its 22-minute running time against under three minutes for East Coast viewers. Survey answers like those feed a US insights and analytics industry that grew to $89.3 billion in 2025, and Alyze caught where those answers broke down before the film reached an audience.
Big advertisers already pay to learn what audiences feel, and System1 Group, the London firm that tests ads by measuring viewers' emotional response, grew revenue 11% over the first five months of FY2027 with its ad testing line up 12%. System1 counts 48 of the world's top 100 brands by media spend as clients, the same brands Alyze Business is built to sell to. MarketsandMarkets sizes emotion detection and recognition at $29.14 billion in 2026 and projects $43.29 billion by 2031, with deep learning driving the growth. Alyze goes after that spending with a second-by-second read that needs only a viewer's webcam, and every brand already paying for emotional testing is a buyer it can pitch.
Companies that sell this kind of measurement have drawn big acquirers, with Smart Eye, the Swedish eye-tracking company, spending $73.5 million in 2021 on Affectiva, whose facial analysis was used by 70% of the world's largest advertisers. Affectiva had reported FY2021 revenue of $5 million, so Smart Eye paid nearly 15 times sales for a business that read faces through cameras. That multiple bought technology that measures how people react to what they watch, and CSOL owns a platform doing the same job through any viewer's webcam.
CSOL is taking that work to the studios first, with Alyze talking with large studios about testing films, series, and trailers before release, while the company recruits across executive leadership, enterprise sales, and technology for an international push. CSOL CEO Shelli Ann Field said Alyze could help make "every connected screen a potential focus group," letting studios, advertisers, retailers, and banks test earlier and compare markets. Those companies all advertise into a global ad market WPP Media expects to grow 8.9% to $1.3 trillion in 2026, which widens Alyze's pool of buyers well past Hollywood.
CSOL heads into its studio talks with a market cap under $2 million and a platform that has been running since 2019, ready to test any cut a studio puts in front of it. The roadmap carries Alyze from pilots with those studios into enterprise integrations and broader deployment, and Field's longer aim is "a continuous decision layer" available wherever an audience's reaction can change the outcome. In film and advertising that reaction decides which trailer gets recut and which campaign gets funded, and Alyze is built to sit under every one of those calls. Studios have always found out how an audience really felt on opening weekend, and CSOL is selling them that answer before a single ticket is sold.
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