A question that the TV industry has been musing, and fretting over, for quite a while is ‘How many people are actually watching shows on Subscription Video On Demand?’
There is constant talk of the landscape changing and audiences getting on board with Video On Demand platforms, shelling out around $9 a month for the likes of Netflix, damaging traditional TV. It’s a situation not disimilar Schrodinger’s Cat. TV is alive and well until the math tells you it isn’t.
In a presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour, Alan Wurtzel, NBCUniversal’s head of research shed some light on the situation.
According to Variety, the ratings stats were collated between September through to December by Symphony, a technology firm based in San Francisco, on a sample size of 15 thousand people. They worked out how many were watching by using audio content recognition software loaded on to participants’ phones to capture the soundtrack of what they are watching and, as a result, create viewing figures – an innovative approach but, as with many other means of measuring audience, not an exact science.
According to their figures Netflix’s Jessica Jones averaged 4.8 million viewers, and 3.2 million watched Narcos, while the hyped Master of None from Aziz Ansari racked up 3 million. Orange is the New Black, hailed as the most-watched original series on the platform that made $5.4 billion in the 12 months to September 30 2015, averaged an audience of 644 thousand. As a comparison, Amazon’s buzzy Man in the High Castle, their highest-rated original series, averaged 2.1 million.
Source : Forbes
