Last week, I embarked on an important thought exercise that I often perform professionally for my clients at Parrot Analytics, where I work as the director of strategy. It’s a game I call platform chess, wherein I deduce genres that each streamer is over-indexed in, under-indexed in, and so forth. After all, we’re still in the earliest stage of the streaming age, one in which each entrant is investigating the metrics that matter most to themselves, which matter to their competitors, and how much to invest and in what genres. 

I’m not pretending that I can program these platforms, but I can provide clues about what’s working and where capital could be spent more effectively. I conduct my platform chess analysis by using proprietary data from Parrot, and third party data from sources such as Nielsen, Antenna, Google Trends, Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDB. In particular, Parrot offers supply and demand data, based on consumption, search, social media, and social video inputs.