Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469966
D E PA R T M E N T 33 KEYFRAME NUMBERS GAMES SUMMER 2022 33 When YouTube and Netflix "video-on-demand" arrived on the scene in the mid- 2000s, streaming was entertainment's new frontier. A quarter of a century later, major traditional players like Disney+ and HBO Max have cemented streaming as an established medium. But when it comes to measuring the success of streamed movies or TV shows with real numbers, that's still a work in progress. The historic standard bearer for TV ratings, Nielson expanded their traditional system in 2014 to include some streaming data. But what worked to create a comprehensive analysis in the Golden Age of television has more than a few obstacles today. In the past all you needed to know was the number of viewers, says Nielsen's SVP of Product Strategy, Brian Fuhrer. The goals were black and white: ad revenue and syndication rights. And for feature films it was the box office. That has all changed with some streaming platforms measuring success by number of subscribers, some by ad revenue, some by hybrids of the two—with no way to measure all the numbers available because content is no longer delivered solely to television screens, and no way to truly compare numbers because streaming platforms' internal analytics are proprietary. On top of these challenges, there is the issue of online activity related to a piece of content—another way to measure viewership. While viewers—now in the form of subscribers—are still the brass ring, this is an equation in which "no one has all the variables," says Fuhrer. Streaming may be fairly straightforward—"any content delivered through the internet … or anything that is app-based," he says—but the Hulu app on your TV is not the same as the Sling TV app on your iPhone, which is a closed environment, meaning you can't put a meter on it the way you can on a television set. In addition, that meter on a TV only gets you so far. "Traditionally we've worked closely with all the broadcasters because they've worked really hard to make sure everything was always measured," says Fuhrer. "And all the technology was embedded [right in the television sets]. Now, with streamers, the relationship's a little different … they like to control the narrative." When it comes to understanding how streaming is analyzed, the only sure conclusion is that there are a lot of conclusions to be drawn. By Kim Fay