How Data and Analytics are Changing the Media and Entertainment Industry

Most of you have probably watched the blockbuster series House of Cards, from Netflix. This show has won three Emmy awards, apart from being a runaway hit. But what you might not know is why Netflix outbid its competitors like HBO to own the rights of this show. Apparently, when Netflix was bidding for the House of Cards series, it had insight that political fiction dramas, with Kevin Spacey in lead role, were highly trending patterns.

How did it reach this conclusion? Netflix was able to assimilate vast amount of viewership data, using which it conducted in-depth and fine-grained analysis of viewers’ habits over many millions of viewings of shows. Netflix could understand the attributes or qualities that were likely to make the show popular; it also knew how long viewers had viewed similar programs, through seasons and individual shows. With this confidence, Netflix made a bolder bid and won the rights to produce the show.

Netflix is said to have capabilities to analyse millions of episodes a day, including when you pause, rewind and fast forward; analyse millions of ratings and searches by the subscribers, as well as the time of day when shows are watched and on what devices.

This is the value of underlying data and the opportunities to monetise the insights it can provide. And it's not just Netflix which is using data like this anymore. Let me share our experience with one of our media and entertainment clients.

We are helping them put together similar value proposition delivering royalty engine that helps their end customers, in this case artists, get accurate information about royalties. It carries out quicker processing by applying complex royalty rules with varied contracts.

This required building an analytical platform to understand the load massive volumes of sales data and process and provide various sales insights like sales trends, territorial analysis, and retailer, distribution channel analysis.

This analytics engine goes through millions of points of viewership data, trending artists in a region, fans location, and churns out the best combination for an entertainment event by an artist, with best viewership potential. This will enable clients to monetise their data assets more effectively and more broadly.

Companies in entertainment and media industry may have better access to the data than most others - by consuming content, the user tells you about the content and format they like, gives their viewing and consumption patterns, and even shares recommendations. This gives them answers such as which formats and channels the consumers will gravitate toward, what content is more likely to be consumed at what time, and how to piece together personalised entertainment from the wealth of options.

The use of analytics can help media companies to solve these questions - to track clicks, views, and shares, across devices and media types. All of these contain information which when properly sifted and understood, can provide the odds for their programming bets.

These ideas are nothing new, but they're more applicable now, thanks to a number of reasons. There is a lot more accessible data, from internal systems, searches, and social media. There is also a lot more cheap computing power thanks to cloud platforms such as AWS, while new techniques and technologies are making it easier and faster to analyse data using built-in statistical methods.

And it's through these techniques that companies are able to refine their offerings, and create content that is finely tuned for what the audience wants - and delivering it to the consumers at the right time, in the right format.

Naveen Kumar is the AVP and Practice Head, Energy, Communications, Utilities, Services – Data Analytics Unit – Infosys.