Too Much TV: There Is So Much We Don't Understand About Streaming Behavior And Metrics

Conventional wisdom is that streaming metrics - How many people watch?, Who are they?, Why did they decide to watch? - is essentially impossible to know.

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Wednesday, July 9th 2025:

PRODUCTION NOTES
Just a reminder that I am going to be attending SRCcon Thursday and Friday. So that might impact the timing of the newsletter, particularly tomorrow.

Now I just have to figure out a way to get to StreamTV Europe in Portugal next spring.

THERE IS A LOT INDUSTRY CONVENTIONAL WISDOM DOESN'T UNDERSTAND ABOUT DATA COLLECTION AND WHAT IT CAN DO
One of the common refrains I hear from both industry creatives as well as industry executives is that streaming metrics - How many people watch?, Who are they?, Why did they decide to watch? Was the release profitable? - are essentially unknowable things. It's a confusing time for people who grew up in an era where television was fairly easy to define. What were the ratings? What was the demo? Did the budget match the results?

One of the issues has been that the data streamers collect is rarely shared with their content partners or the public (including reporters). However, it has also been the case that the granular data necessary to provide streamers with more detailed assessments on the most accurate way to value content, reduce churn, and offer specific suggestions on where advertising will be most effective has been lacking.

One new option is SubScape Streaming Segments, a collaboration between Claritas and Magid which seeks to understand people’s streaming behaviors. The segments uncover whether people subscribe to streaming services for a specific show and churn once the season is finished, or stay subscribed. It also covers whether they’re a streamer's biggest evangelists or aren’t interested in streaming at all.

I recently spoke with Ron Cohen, SVP of Practice Leadership at Claritas LLC and Mike Bloxham, EVP of Global Media and Entertainment at Magid about their partnership and the possibilities presented by SubScape.

This conversation was incredibly helpful to me. But it also made me realize I could spend a year writing stories based just on the top-line data they've assembled.

Here is a short excerpt from my conversation with the two executives and here is a link to the entire 5,400-word interview. Which is long, but well worth reading because it includes just a wealth of information about their partnership and the specific data they are able to provide:

Mike Bloxham: I'll give you a really good example. That hypers group that I talked about, they're about 12% of the population.

They're that high-churn, high-value group. They tell more people about more content than any other group. They spend more money on entertainment-type expenditures, in a given month.

They're really important to you, even though they churn. Every streamer, in our view, should have a hyper strategy, whether they think of them as hypers or not. You should have a distinct strategy for these people that come and go, because your goal should be, if you're one of those services they're not going to stick with 12 months of the year, and that's true of most services, your goal should be to get another couple of months out of the year.

For one of those services (editors note: at StreamTV, he mentioned HBO Max), we did a calculation where we said, if they could get 25% of their high-churn subscribers to spend two months of the year more on the platform at retail, that would add $112 million to the bottom line. It gives you an idea of their importance, because this group, they're 12% of the population, but on average, across the last year, they've accounted for about 30% of new subscriptions, sign-ups every month, and about 21% of drops every month. So they are disproportionately important.

Claritas, with their system, is actually able to say which segments within their system, therefore which households, are most likely to be hypers. Then they can be specifically targeted, whether it's via email, social, open web, CTV, whatever it happens to be. And that's really important if you're going to put out differentiated messaging to this group, where you're trying to say, "We want you to come back a month earlier, we want you to stick around for a month longer."

And because we've also integrated another data set called emotional DNA, which is all about show titles, movie titles, content, that people watch. And an understanding of how they engage with it and how they perceive it in emotional terms. So we're able to overlay that so the messaging can be informed by saying, okay, people lean into this show, they watch it with their kids, they watch it because it's uplifting, it's moving, it's funny, it's outrageous, whatever it happens to be, we've got all of that.

So it can inform not only the targeting, but also the messaging to the specific clusters within Prism, the households, that are most likely to be those high churn subscribers. Just to give you that as an example of the sort of combined utility.

I learned so much talking to these two and I hope this interview helps change a few minds about what kind of data can be crunched and effectively utilized in the streaming television industry. Granted, the streamers may never share any of what the learn from services such as SubScape. But that's another conversation entirely.

I DON'T WISH ANYONE HARM, BUT....
If some magic trick could take everyone attending the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference this week and transport them to a secluded island Gilligan's Island-style, the world of media - and honestly, the world in general - would be a much better place. From the disgraced Charlie Rose interviewing Barry Diller to Ivanka Trump hobnobbing with media executives such as Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav, the event exemplifies everything that is wrong with concentrated wealth and its impact on the media.

In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a media mogul who isn't at the event this year. While the list of attendees is not made public, some of the people who have been spotted by the press (who are limited to covering the event from the resort's driveway), include Apple CEO Tim Cook, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and CFO Spencer Neumann, Apple’s SVP of Services Eddy Cue, Disney CEO Bob Iger, as well as Disney’s four segment chairs, Jimmy Pitaro, Dana Walden, Josh Amaro and Alan Bergman

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels are there, along with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, News Corporation CEO Robert Thomson, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and President Mike Cavanagh. As well as Sony Pictures CEO and President Ravi Ahuja.

And of course, while none of Hollywood's talent is invited, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is there, gladhanding and hoping to negotiate some deals to Hoover up licensing deals for his AI company

TWEET OF THE DAY

ODDS AND SODS
* HBO Max has canceled the drama Duster, less than a week after the season one finale premiered. The cancellation leaves The Pitt as the only current HBO Max original series.

* The WGA East and West both announced today they are leaving X/Twitter, following the site's AI Grok posting a string of pro-Hitler, extremely racist responses.

* I realize that industry journalists need to keep the content conveyor belt filled, but doing an entire piece on how many views a trailer received is not only dumb, but it highlights some very questionable metrics.

WHAT'S NEW TONIGHT AND THIS WEEKEND

THURSDAY, JULY 10TH, 2025:
American Gangster: Trap Queens (BET+)
Back To The Frontier Series Premiere (Magnolia)
Big Brother Season Premiere (CBS)
Brick (Netflix)
Celebrity Family Feud Season Premiere (ABC)
Chasing The West Series Premiere (HGTV)
Dr. Stone Science Future (Crunchyroll)
Electric Bloom Series Premiere (Disney)
Isadora Moon (Max)
Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story (NatGeo)
Johanna Möller: Sweden's Most Hated Woman (Viaplay)
Leviathan Series Premiere (Netflix)
Lie Detector Truth Or Deception Series Premiere (A&E)
Off Road Series Premiere (Netflix)
Press Your Luck Season Premiere (ABC)
7 Bears (Netflix)
Solo Camping For Two Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
Stranger With My Name (LMN)
Suspicious Minds Series Premiere (Hulu)
The Real Housewives Of Orange County Season Premiere (Bravo)
Too Much Series Premiere (Netflix)
Zombies 4: Dawn Of The Vampires (Disney)

FRIDAY, JULY 11TH, 2025:
Aap Jaisa Koi (Netflix)
Almost Cops (Netflix)
Dani Rovira: It's Worth It (Netflix)
Foundation Season Three Premiere (Apple TV+)
Madea's Destination Wedding (Netflix)
Murderbot Season One Finale (Apple TV+)
One Night In Idaho: The College Murders (Prime Video)
Operation: Aunties (ALLBLK)
Push (Shudder)
Rage Series Premiere (HBO MAX)
Taste Of His Own Poison (LMN)
The Great American Recipe Season Four Premiere (PBS)
The Wild Ones (Apple TV+)
Tougen Anki Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)

SEE YOU ON THURSDAY!