Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Netflix ca-ta-strophe

You don’t want your bad news to lead the main evening news in a wealthy but peripheral market.

“Netflix has just known a ca-ta-strophic day on the stock exchange”, losing $15bln, 12% of its market cap, after its first-ever drop in US subscriptions. —Sacha Daout, 19h30, RTBF, Belgium

It has been clear for years that the economic case for Netflix was not firm even when beheld at a squint. But this rather forces the reckoning into the present moment. The wall in front of you might be closer than it appears and moving faster.

If Netflix is seen to fail, and I don’t see how at least its worldwide original content could survive, it will be a terribly chilling effect on originals, at least in many linguistic groups at once.


Image: RTBF

Thursday, July 4, 2019

Crossplatform measurement urges a rethink of intab, reach

Existing definitions are already too diverse for a level playing field. We must adapt them further to work well for video measurement intended to capture all screens.

Alldience, a joint platform developed by Immetrica and eCGlobal, can measure any screen, anytime, anywhere using smartphones. The smartphone is on or within reach of most people who have one, most hours of the day; it is the closest practical approximation to the often–quoted ideal of one Nielsen client of a measurement device implanted in the sample member. Furthermore, a double-digit percentage and increasing share of viewing is done on mobile devices, mostly invisible to conventional measurement technology—but not to Alldience, where the measurement smartphone is either also the playback device or close to one.

When we set out to design this system, we confronted one problem that was conceptual rather than technological: the inadequacy of the intab definition. The intab is the cooperating part of the sample. Most viewing and listening measures are fractions in which the intab is the denominator (as in a rating), or an element of it (as in a share). The required degree of cooperation varies from a few minutes to almost the entire reporting day, but whichever it is, the intab varies directly with the sample size.