How to get to know the audience in times of 'streaming' | TV
The industry of TV lives a paradoxical situation in the face of the crisis of traditional audience measurement systems, a currency accepted by all but always debatable. On the one hand, the new video on demand services (such as Netflix Y Amazon Prime VideoThey know exactly what their clients see, but they hide the figures except when it is convenient for them. And on the other hand, consumption, especially fiction, is personalized and distanced from the regular programming of the channels. But in the absence of data, alternatives begin to emerge and one of the most attractive is TVLytics, a tool that uses the popular mobile application as a base TV Time.
Launched in 2011, TV Time helps its users to keep track of the series they watch. For example, it notifies when there are new chapters of a title. According to company data, the countries where it is most established are the United States, Brazil, France, Italy and Spain, which allows covering a broad socio-cultural spectrum.
Account Jeremy Reed, director of programming of TV Time, that the creation of TVLytics arose to make the application economically profitable. As the company's headquarters are in California and in close contact with the audiovisual industry, creating a data tool was a logical step: "TVLytics helps determine how content spending will be: where Netflix will invest their money, where the market is going, and even which actor is going to be hired, "he explains.
TVLytics incorporates data accumulated over five years on the activity of one million daily users and 12 million accounts registered in TV Time, relating to the chapters of 65,000 series of all the chains and video demand services. Although TV Time depends on the data that the user introduces about the monitoring they do to each series, the tool has clear strengths. For example, information about the viewing device, counting as preferred users those that are furthest away from traditional television consumption (young people) and the possibility of establishing affinities between series.
"We can say who is watching it, where they are seeing it and how they are seeing it," Reed continues. For example, it is allowed to filter the data by country or age profile. For a user, this allows access to a recommendation system articulated on 12 different factors. But for a TVLytics client, such as the United Talent representative agency, it allows you to configure a project designed for a Hollywood studio, from the genre to the actors, or to renegotiate the contract with an on-demand video operator that conceals its data.
Each week, TV Time reveals its Binge Report (literally, marathon report), a list of the series that are consumed more intensely by its users. It is in this weekly report that they appeared the first clues of the international impact of The house of papel Y Elite, before Netflix presented them as great successes to its shareholders.
Jeremy Reed agreed to share for EL PAÍS some of the global data of both series in his tool. They show the enormous capacity of loyalty of both titles: from the users who started them, they completed the first seasons by 93% (The paper house) and 94% (Elite). The computer was the preferred device (42% and 39%, respectively) to see them. The subversive message of The paper house is appreciated in some of the favorite series of his followers, such as The mechanism (which portrays corruption in Brazil) or the North American Manhunt (about the anarchist terrorist Unabomber). Not in vain, the Professor (Álvaro Morte) is his favorite character.
On the other hand, fans of Elite like other Netflix fictions about private schools like Baby Y Greenhouse Academy. The unequal relationship between Guzmán (Miguel Bernardeau) and Nadia (Mina El Hammani) is one of the strong points of the juvenile series, as they are the favorite male and female characters. If you can make an equivalence between television and haute cuisine, TVLytics perhaps does not give the recipe for success, but it does help to specify which are the best ingredients.
Concepción Cascajosa is a professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Carlos III University of Madrid.
