And that may not happen.
“I don’t think there is a strong incentive to be more public about audience data,” said Zak Shaikh, vice president of programming and entertainment at research-based media firm Magid.
After all, audience is not really important to services because most trust a subscription business model. Still, having a branded movie like “Hamilton” on the service draws attention to Disney +, which in turn could draw more subscribers.
As these major releases change from theatrical plans to digital releases, their audience changes from transparent to opaque.
And the line between “what is successful and what is not getting too blurry” in the streaming world, said Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Boxoffice.com.
That opacity doesn’t always work in favor of a service or studio, because box office totals and TV ratings are more than a metric of success. They provide marketing opportunities to promote a movie or television show based on popularity, according to Robbins. That’s why the big summer movie commercials always tell you to watch “World’s No. 1 Movie!”
“Retaining the data can protect the reality from disappointing results, but it also means that successes cannot be measured or leveraged,” Robbins said. “The box office data has become similar to baseball statistics. A studio can use a movie’s opening weekend to promote how popular a player’s popularity skyrockets when they hit 50 home runs in one season.”
Ultimately, true transparency may require advertisers to introduce streaming services into it, said Shaikh, the Magid analyst.
“As the world of streaming becomes more crowded, advertising-based services will begin to play a bigger role,” Shaikh added. “And advertisers may well require that this data be public, so to help make comparisons between pieces of content.”
Until then, the broadcast success of “Hamilton” and movies like this will be open for interpretation.
“Clearly it is about the large number of subscribers and not the success of individual titles that are important to broadcasting companies,” said Dergarabedian, an analyst at Comscore. “But as more services and content come online, it would be up to the industry to embrace the power of data to influence consumer behavior.”
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