M+E Daily

As the streaming service wars to attract and retain subscribers become even more competitive and the state of streaming continues to evolve, shifts in viewership have emerged from the Netflix-dominant world, according to Whip Media.

But, as platform choices increase, viewer frustration has increased right along with it. Although viewers have complex tastes, they are all too often met with simplistic recommendations from the streaming services that are based on only a partial view of their content preferences, creating an important need for the right correct viewership insights, at the right time, for the right platform.

Whip Media’s first-party, always-on consumer insights offer deep viewer intelligence that predicts content demand to help drive marketing, licensing, programming and development decisions, according to Alex von Krogh, the company’s VP, global insights at Whip Media.

“Today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the messy world we’re in today with a diversity of streaming services out there, “he said Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES).

During the session “Must Have Data for 2023 – Get the Full 360 View of Tomorrow’s Consumer, Today,” he pointed to the “difficulty for consumers in understanding what to watch for platforms and recommending what to watch.”

But the streaming platforms “can use data to help make better personalization and recommendations to consumers and keep them” on their platforms, he told attendees.

The Whip Media Exchange is a content hub that he explained “brings buyers and sellers of content together and has a data-driven aspect to it so they can help value content buyers and sellers can streamline the decision-making process around finding what’s going to be right on my platform in my country, and then the sellers make that content available to them.”

He went on to make note of the four datasets that Whip Media uses, starting with the TVDB Entertainment Database, a metadata platform that he said is “crowdsourced [and] allows us to understand a full, complete picture of metadata around titles globally.”

The database has “hundreds of thousands of titles,” including 330,000 movies and 130,000 TV programs, he said. “We operate this and we take that data, we license that data separately, but we also feed it into our TV Time app,” which is a tracking and social network for consumers, he noted.

The TV Time app was designed for viewers who “have a really tough time finding where to watch something,” he pointed out.

For streaming availability data, Whip Media has a partnership with the media intelligence company BB in South America, which he said provides Whip Media  with that data, he said. That allows users of the app to find content, which is “one of the key utilities of the app,” he said.

Whip Media also has a Demand Score platform that it launched last year and is “really is picking up traction in the marketplace,” he told attendees.

The Demand Score takes TV Time data on everything that people are watching and uses that to “build modeled out predictions of how a piece of content performs in a given country on a given platform, and “that’s what fuels” the Whip Media Exchange, he said.

The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.