Nielsen’s Gracenote has launched new datasets that aim to help guide licensing strategies for content owners and buyers by quantifying program’s “bingeability” and other characteristics, along with past availability on streaming services.
The syndicated datasets are meant to shed light on characteristics of programs that resonate with consumers, driving viewership and engagement. It also looks at historical information (available for the past five years) and placement of content, which Gracenote says is key to driving maximum value out of the programming down the line.
“As the streaming business continues to put huge investment into creating content, we are seeing the need for new metrics and insights to help guide monetization efforts,” said Simon Adams, chief product officer at Gracenote, in a statement. “Gracenote’s Content Analytics solutions, including our new Distribution Dynamics and Program Availability Archive datasets, meet these needs by providing owners and buyers trusted data and intelligence to inform decision-making around their content strategies.”
The Distribution Dynamics dataset provides insights on consumption of individual streaming and broadcast shows by looking at three elements. Those include: Bingeabillity – measuring the average number of TV show episodes watched per day to measure consumer tendency to view multiple episodes in a row; Loyalty – clocks the number of minutes and percentage of available content viewed per month to show how likely viewers are to continue watching a program; and Program Similarity, which identifies content that is similar to other programs “based on lookalike thematic characteristics, viewing audiences and historical performance.”
Gracenote, the entertainment metadata arm of Nielsen, says by using these datasets both streaming services and networks can optimize their programming slate by understanding what content is better geared toward bringing in new viewers versus keeping current viewers, or knowing what types of shows resonate more with certain audiences.
On the media company and studio side, they can help solve challenges with content distribution by providing insights to understand what content to create or license to get maximum viewers.
Meanwhile, the Program Availability Archive product helps guide future distribution decisions by giving a clear look at how content has been placed across various streaming services in the past. Historical information includes program and episode titles, unique Gracenote content identifiers, original air dates, availability start and end dates, and season and episode numbers.
According to Nielsen, “content creators, licensors and buyers can see program release scheduling, stacking, windowing and removal information and develop go-forward content strategies. Additionally, this information enables whitespace analysis capabilities and comparisons between owned content catalogs and those of competitors.”
The data can come in handy as companies decide where to place content, be it on their own streaming service platforms or through distribution deals. NBCUniversal in March made an expected decision to end a license agreement with Disney-controlled Hulu (in which NBCU parent Comcast still owns a 33% stake) that removes its broadcast next-day episodes (such as “Saturday Night Live” and “The Voice”) from Hulu and shifts the content to its own Peacock streaming service beginning this fall.
As for Gracenote, the new offerings are meant to complement the unit’s existing Content Analytics product. It’s the latest addition for Gracenote, having just released a Streaming Channels Data product, which aims to help streaming content discovery platforms connect consumers to free ad-supported TV channels and linear channels on virtual MVPDs.