Business intelligence in the age of binge watching streaming content

In the age of Netflix and binge watching series’ episodes, the media industry’s traditional tools for measuring success are insufficient at best, and detrimental at worst. How can media and entertainment companies utilize business intelligence capabilities to handle the digital transformation sweeping the industry?

A large percentage of the revenue that media companies bring in now originates from platforms that a decade ago didn’t exist. This change has been so disruptive that media companies today struggle just to keep up with their customer base. Getting ahead of customer demand seems near impossible.

Some initial resistance to digital content has been replaced by an acceptance—if not embrace—of downloading and streaming media. The industry realizes that over the last 20 years it has left money on the table, and the only way to survive is by enhancing business intelligence (BI) to get ahead of customer preferences.

Media companies and content platforms today engage their respective audiences on a myriad of platforms, and in that process they collect a wealth of data about consumers. This treasure trove includes what content they watch, how and when they watch it and even what they might be interested in watching more than a year from now. Learn more about leveraging audience data via the IBM Behavior-based Audience Insight for Media and Entertainment solution.

But having access to the data and making sense of it are two different animals. Media and entertainment companies need to take advantage of all the data around the consumer, not just data in back-office or transactional systems. However, much of the new data that media companies handle is semistructured because it originates from social media, the web, mobile devices and Internet of Things devices in a wide range of formats and repositories. That kind of format means the data lacks a relational schema and is more challenging to analyze with traditional BI and analytics solutions.

RSG Media is a business solutions provider for media and entertainment companies.;