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Consulting company Owl & Co. has created a new way to gauge the popularity of shows and movies on streaming platforms — taking into account the share of subscribers that watch a show or movie on any given platform.
The Big Picture: The traditional TV measurement system hasn’t fully evolved with siloed user bases of streaming. A unified, public chart of what titles are popular with the users on their platforms could finally determine what qualifies as a hit… at least, relatively speaking.
Behind The Scenes: Owl & Co.’s “in-universe ratings” could shake up the streaming industry.
- Owl & Co. measures the in-universe rating by weighing an original show’s viewership against the total number of subscribers on a platform (based on data from analytics company Luminate).
- The firm then gives a show a rating between 0 and 100 — the percentage of a streamer’s user base that watched the show within a month.
- That means a show like Netflix’s Nobody Wants This can get a 20.4, while Paramount+’s Tulsa King can get a 16.5 — a pretty close score despite the user bases of those streamers being far apart.
Closing Credits: The in-universe rating should give people a fairer picture of just how popular a show is for a streamer… and, luckily, rely less on obscure headlines of a title being a streamer’s most popular launch over St. Patricks Day weekend or whatever spin they come up with. It’ll also likely become a key metric for determining the new streaming residual (a title needing to be watched by 20% or more of a service’s audience in the first 90 days of release), so expect creatives to follow these ratings very closely.
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