VOD Clickstream was created in response to a manufactured scarcity created by the VOD platforms. We passionately believe that filmmakers, creators and producers have a right to know how audiences are responding to content – both their own and that created by others.
Box office gross, video sales and broadcast viewing figures all give creators clues as to what audiences want and how to shape their projects. But over the past decade, we have seen an increasing share of the film and television value chain disappear behind closed doors.
As more of the media economy takes place within restricted private networks, filmmakers and creators are becoming further removed from what audiences want. Without feedback, creators struggle to make commercial projects. Without reliable financial estimates, business plans become fanciful. Without data, we’re all just guessing.
As VOD continues to become an ever-larger window of release, it has drawn an impenetrable veil over a vital part of a film or TV show’s financial journey.
This has created an artificial data drought. So much so that our clickstream dataset is currently the only global measure of VOD activity of its kind.
And it’s not perfect. There are limitations and caveats with the dataset which means that we are observing the truth through an imperfect lens. But in the absence of anything better, this is what we’re left to work with.
Our dataset should be useless. If the VOD platforms released full and timely data then this kind of clickstream analysis would be unnecessary.
In the short-term, we hope this project gives creators and film/ TV professionals a useful insight into how the world of VOD relates to their existing data and knowledge. In the long-term, we hope it spurs the platforms to release their own data. Please, Netflix, make our project useless!
Granular viewing data directly from the platforms themselves is what we all need. In the meantime, the VOD Clickstream dataset is the best we have. And that’s a shame.
For more on this, click here to read our origin story.