Reports: scripted drama

Digital connections have filled the void left by real-world activities, globalising culture and experience. Yet this comes at the cost of deepening divides in trust and perspective. Changing economic circumstances have brought about a demographic dichotomy of age and income.

TV fandom underpins viewing across all platforms and territories, but is being reshaped by streaming, with audiences having much greater control over what they watch. This choice-led viewing provides the foundations for deeper degrees of audience fandom, but also the diminishment of more passive audience elements.

With TV content audiences becoming ever more fragmented and streaming services guarded with their metrics, understanding the appeal of TV shows has never been more complicated. In this report, we present summary data from the first year of MIDiA’s TV Brand Tracker to reveal an objective and platform-neutral view of which shows resonated most with audiences in 2017.

In our July report, TV Show Fandom: Measuring TV Shows’ Real Appeal , we introduced MIDiA’s quarterly Paid Content Brand Tracker by revealing a sneak peek of the data we track for more than 50 TV shows in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. In this report, we provide analysis of some of the top-level trends for the Q2 2017 edition of the MIDiA Brand Tracker.

The TV industry is in a measurement crisis. Ever more, viewing is shifting from the linear schedule and leading streaming services are heavily guarded about their data, creating a measurement blind spot. Social behaviour and piracy activity provide an additional source of information, but not an alternative.

SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) is now the default mainstream video on demand consumption behaviour for TV-like content. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are now the twin lenses behind measuring overall SVOD engagement. Netflix and Amazon users over-index on all SVOD consumption metrics tracked and this underlines the importance of engaging with these segments.

The shift to digital consumption has brought SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) to the fore. And leading the charge both domestically in the US and internationally are Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Netflix is now in 190 territories and Amazon Prime Video is now available in 242 separate territories.

At the start of 2016 the tech hype machine was going into overdrive over the potential for Virtual Reality to finally break through to the mainstream. January’s CES in Las Vegas featured the launch of Fox Studio’s The Martian Experience, their second VR project in conjunction with a major big screen production.