Opinion: Following the viewer's journey

Matt Ross, chief analytics officer at SVoD viewing measurement company Digital i, explains why broadcasters and streamers continue to need timely and insightful audience data

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Published: January 6, 2025 Updated: January 7, 2025

Matt Ross, chief analytics officer at SVoD viewing measurement company Digital i, explains why broadcasters and streamers continue to need timely and insightful audience data

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Analysts have predicted that 2025 will bring an end to the global commissioning slump, as well as a return to higher programming spend.

This is great news for the market, not to mention audiences, but the feeling all round is that we are not out of the weeds just yet. Quality over quantity will remain a watchword for many international companies and returnable series with broad appeal will only continue to grow in value in the coming months.

Matt Ross So it remains vital for broadcasters and streamers to make the right choices when commissioning, renewing and acquiring shows.

Keeping up with the times Digital i has been around for more than 20 years, originally founded in 2003 by maths teacher turned data wizard, Ali Vahdati.

A licensed Barb bureau, Digital i started out as a firm focused on tracking and reporting on UK linear viewing figures, but as the industry has evolved, so have we.

Today, Digital i monitors audience data for global streaming services Netflix, Disney+, Amazon's Prime Video and Warner Bros. Discovery's Max in almost 20 countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Australia and much of Europe and Latin America.

We draw audience samples from curated opt-in panels around the world, with members remunerated for the information they provide. Data is then gathered passively through our privacy-compliant applications and parsed by our SoDA system and in-house experts.

Because we have one unified panel we can follow a single viewer's journey between different services, gathering deep household demographic data, which is comparable across all our measured regions and platforms.

This is how we know that 52 per cent of Disney+ viewership was for kids' content last year, or can share insights into how Netflix viewers in the UK are increasingly consuming local licensed content made five years ago or more.

Best use case scenarios Our data is used in a variety of ways, with our clients including commissioners, producers and distributors from around the world.

For example, we can work with content licensing departments to find out how well specific shows are performing - valuable intel ahead of their next renewal negotiation with a buyer - and spot emerging opportunities into which countries to sell.

We can also advise those same buyers as to which titles have been performing well, and among which demographics, or report on trends and viewing habits that might impact their commissioning strategy, globally or in specific territories.

At a more granular level, we can advise on launch strategies, analysing how day-one full season drops are consumed compared to titles released weekly or stripped.

Navigating evolving waters Digital i has ambitious plans to continue to grow, whether that is reporting on more services in more countries, or by improving our processes and offering.

We have started to dip our toes into the AI waters, already using the tech to speed up our development and research projects. Machine learning has also become an important tool in data quality checks and advanced statistical modelling.

Perhaps the most exciting potential use would be insight detection - we would be interested to see if AI is able to more efficiently spot emerging content trends in our data.

However, we see AI as a tool to further enhance our service, not as a replacement for the human expertise that Digital i has to offer.

In the competitive years ahead, broadcasters and streamers will continue to need timely and insightful audience data, while rights holders and talent will need to understand the value of their assets more than ever before.

Digital i will keep growing and will be there to help them navigate the evolving waters.

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