Earlier this week, I was chatting with a television executive when the conversation segued to a frequent lament: the opacity of the industry in its evolution from linear to streaming. Not only is data still proprietary, but there is no consensus on which metrics matter, and how they matter to each service, given the particularities of users, libraries, and strategies.
The confusion plays out in all kinds of ways, but this TV executive was complaining about a practical challenge: when shopping a new project to a streamer, there’s essentially no benchmark for success or failure. Every streamer has its own greenlight process, its own strategy for increasing subscribers and lowering churn, and virtually nobody wants to share the numbers that justify these decisions.
