The business has long used box-office numbers, which are publicly sliced and diced ad infinitum. Similarly, disc sales and rentals for years have been monitored by the Rentrak data company and others.
But as consumers shift to new channels like Netflix and Amazon, there are no generally available industrywide data on the digital performance of individual movies.
While the studios get some information, it isn’t widely shared with filmmakers, agencies or the public — and those who hold the data have a distinct advantage when it comes to making deals or deciding which movies to back, or what to spend on them.
By and large, public reports of digital performance are currently limited to a handful of films, or they simply report rankings without numbers. As of Aug. 27, for instance, Rentrak’s public listing showed “The Great Gatsby” to be the top performing on-demand film as reported by its participating services, but it offered no stats.
In an address at the Toronto International Film Festival last Tuesday, Liesl Copland, a digital media expert from the William Morris Endeavor Entertainment agency, told a small group of documentary filmmakers about this large, if barely visible, problem.
Movies tumble into “analytic black holes” when they are viewed on subscription services like Netflix, on-demand providers like the cable companies and iTunes, or an advertising-driven distributor like SnagFilms, she said.
“Reporting hasn’t evolved with the rapidly increasing viewership patterns,” Ms. Copland noted. “There is still no uniform reporting system that aggregates all data on, say, a film or documentary across all of its platforms.”
This wasn’t some data lover’s plea for more, more, more. A former Netflix executive who now helps to package and sell films for one of Hollywood’s largest agencies, Ms. Copland comes to her topic with an insider’s sense of both the problems and the possibilities in movie data-sharing. In her current role, she desperately wants to know more about the digital audience, whose behavior is now crucial to structuring deals and advising clients as to whether a particular project will fly.
“Richer content and more engaged audiences” she posited, might result from access to shared data — and, of course, more deal-making leverage for agents.
Digital distributors, she pointed out, may know infinitely more about their customers than studios could glean from their box-office analytics, even when bolstered by focus groups, exit polls, prerelease tracking interviews and close monitoring of social media.
It is no trick for a subscription or on-demand movie service to figure out what you like, when you like to watch it, how much you’re willing to pay and even whether you are — i.e., sneaking a peak at a film or show, though you’ve promised to watch with a mate.
In making decisions about whether to back series like “House of Cards,” Ms. Copland reminded her listeners, Netflix relied heavily on its enormous bank of largely private information.
In truth, on-demand distributors share a great deal of data with the studios from which they’ve purchased films. For the last several years, moreover, the studios, large and small, have been sharing title-by-title information about digital downloads with one another via an arrangement with Rentrak, which collects the data and circulates it among roughly 170 entertainment company clients.
The studios also receive reports with some information on the streaming of individual titles from the NPD Group, another data company. But detailed streaming data are not routinely shared with filmmakers, agencies or news organizations.
Bruce Goerlich, Rentrak’s chief research officer, noted that the wall around digital performance information was simply an extension of confidentiality strictures that have long surrounded video performance numbers.
“Measurement can equal monetization can equal a fight,” he said of the entertainment industry’s tendency to conceal data.
Mr. Goerlich, who spoke by telephone last week, seconded what Ronald J. Sanders, the president of worldwide home entertainment distribution at Warner Brothers, had to say about the public availability of box-office numbers (which are also compiled under an industry arrangement with Rentrak, then distributed to the press and others), compared with the digital numbers.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/business/media/movie-industry-wants-to-get-a-handle-on-the-digital-box-office.html?partner=rss&emc=rss