Nielsen’s Gracenote Will Measure TV Shows’ ‘Bingeability’ and Availability on Streaming to Help Guide Licensing Strategies

Jennifer Maas
·3 min read

Nielsen’s media data arm Gracenote is launching new tools to measure the “bingeability” and streaming availability of TV shows to offer companies guidance in licensing and acquisition during the Peak TV era.

Joining Gracenote’s Content Analytics data group, which features Inclusion Analytics and Audience Predict, the Distribution Dynamics and Program Availability Archive will “provide the content marketplace insights into characteristics of programming that drives consumption and historical availability enabling data-driven decision-making,” per Nielsen.

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The Distribution Dynamics offering will look at the following, in order to evaluate how specific streaming and broadcast series are consumed:

  • Bingeability – Measures the average number of TV show episodes watched per day to quantify viewer propensity to consume multiple episodes in a row

  • Loyalty – Captures the number of minutes and percentage of available content viewed per month to highlight viewer likeliness to stick with a program

  • Program Similarity – Identifies programs that resemble other programs based on lookalike thematic characteristics, viewing audiences and historical performance

Per Nielsen, “Leveraging this intelligence, streaming services and networks can optimize slate management through visibility into what content is better suited for viewer acquisition versus viewer retention, or what types of programming better resonate with certain audiences. Media companies and studios can solve content distribution challenges by understanding what programming to create or license to maximize viewership. Studios, streaming services and networks can answer content development questions by identifying underserved viewership segments.”

For Gracenote’s Program Availability Archive, the focus is on past placement of content across streamers, with information from the past five years on program and episode titles, unique Gracenote content identifiers (IDs), original air dates;. availability start and end dates as well as season and episode numbers.

“Using the Gracenote Program Availability Archive, content creators, licensors and buyers can see program release scheduling, stacking, windowing and removal information and develop go-forward content strategies,” per Nielsen. “Additionally, this information enables whitespace analysis capabilities and comparisons between owned content catalogs and those of competitors.”

This information is more valuable now than ever, as streamers compete for top titles and companies decide whether to keep their valuable library content for their own platforms or set lucrative deals with competitors. Take “South Park,” for example, which was licensed by Paramount Global to WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and lives on that platform instead of its parent company’s Paramount+. Paramount is bringing the series home in 2025, when that deal is up.

Gracenote will unveil its new Content Analytics solutions and datasets later Wednesday to video content production and distribution executives in attendance at NATPE Hollywood in Los Angeles.

“As the streaming business continues to put huge investment into creating content, we are seeing the need for new metrics and insights to help guide monetization efforts,” Simon Adams, chief product officer at Gracenote, said in a statement. “Gracenote’s Content Analytics solutions, including our new Distribution Dynamics and Program Availability Archive datasets, meet these needs by providing owners and buyers trusted data and intelligence to inform decision-making around their content strategies.”

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