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Eric Steinberg, media research and insights lead for Whip Media Group, had both good news and bad news for attendees of the annual Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) Spring event, during his presentation “Use Consumer Data to Predict Content Success: What’s Your Demand Score?”

Through 2025, the number of VOD, SVOD, EST and TVOD services are expected to only continue to grow and become more varied, and “if you’re managing one of these platforms, then it’s really important that you’re making the right content decisions, because consumers are voraciously eating up this content, and you have to feed that.”

But at the same time, Steinberg shared statistics showing that a full 33 percent of consumers say they plan on canceling a subscription during the next year, with 18 percent saying they won’t renew when their subscription is up.

“This speaks to the fickleness of the consumer,” he said. “You have to fight churn, if you’re managing one of these platforms. If one of your competitors is losing folks, you have to have the content to [gain] them.”

And it doesn’t hurt to have first-party data to prevent that churn for your service. That’s what Whip Media is all about, Steinberg said. With 62 percent of media and entertainment companies saying “data equals opportunity,” and 71 percent saying they’re striving to better understand the data available to them, what Whip does is proving more crucial than ever before.

The company’s consumer-facing app TV Time “brings order to content chaos” by tracking the viewing habits of 16 million worldwide users, proving users of the free app alerts around content in return.

“The give us information about the titles they’re watching, how they feel about these programs,” Steinberg said. The 40 million consumer reactions TV Time generates each month, around the 300,000-plus TV and film titles monitored, offers the clearest views possible on engagement, sentiment, and viewing intent, in the industry. “It’s an intent-to-view metric,” he added.

Take ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV, and its expansion into Italy: they asked Whip to identify shows of Italian origin that they could put on the service. Steinberg said the company’s data was able to show that local Italian crime titles would be a good fit with that potential Pluto TV audience, identifying the audience, and avoiding any guesswork.

To view the entire presentation, click here.

HITS Spring was presented by IBM Security with sponsorship by Genpact, Irdeto, Tata Consultancy Services, Convergent Risks, Equinix, MicroStrategy, Microsoft Azure, PacketFabric, Richey May Technology Solutions, Tamr, Whip Media, Eluvio, 5th Kind, LucidLink, Salesforce, Signiant, Zendesk, EIDR and the Trusted Partner Network.