Rentrak (NASDAQ:RENT), a company that supplies information and data management software to track content distribution, reported earnings for its fourth quarter and full fiscal year after the bell yesterday. How did it do with its own stats?

The fourth quarter wasn't too exciting. Revenue growth was flat, with the top line coming in at $28.3 million. Net income was also uninspiring, moving up about 7% to $0.15 per diluted share.

The full year had a lot more juice to it. Sales grew over 13% to $106 million, and net income jumped 35% to $0.54 per diluted share. Now that's more like it.

All industries thrive on data to make decisions. Rentrak aims to do this for the media world -- provide data in a manner that shows how content is being utilized so that distribution and marketing schemes can be set to maximize profits. Rentrak has software suites that help in the reporting of box-office grosses and revenues from the home-video marketplace. The company also has software available for supply chain management.

Media information will no doubt become more valuable as time goes on, and this would seem to be what a company like Rentrak is betting on. Considering that entertainment distribution is changing on an almost-daily basis, it's easy to see why data capture is vital. Companies like Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), Viacom (NYSE:VIA), CBS (NYSE:CBS), and News Corp. (NYSE:NWS) are being bombarded with all kinds of different ways to get their products to the people -- it's imperative that they do so in an efficient manner. With new broadband technologies, studios and cable businesses such as Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) and Cablevision (NYSE:CVC) are experimenting with on-demand platforms that need to be tweaked accordingly to add as much value as possible to both consumer and suppliers.

Rentrak, like the Nielsen Company, is developing new information systems to evolve right alongside the changing nature of the studios. CEO Paul Rosenbaum stated in the earnings release that Rentrak will continue to allocate its cash flow toward investments in services that measure broadband, television, and mobile content usage. This should further solidify the company's standing in the entertainment data-collection industry.

Over the last five years, Rentrak's stock has done very well. The future could be bright for this small-cap company, thanks to the valuable service it provides to the entertainment industry. However, with the stock not that far from the upper end of its 52-week range, I'd say that now might not be the best time to enter since the market has been fairly volatile of late. This is, however, a company that should be put on a list for further due diligence because, again, I like its business prospects because of what it does. Since the company's full-year earnings growth was impressive, it will be interesting to see how the next few quarters fare.  

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Fool contributor Steven Mallas owns none of the companies mentioned. As of this writing, he was ranked 9,079 out of 30,129 investors in the CAPS system. Don't know what CAPS is? Check it out. The Fool has a disclosure policy.