CDSA

Cinelytic CEO Looks to Make Most of P2P Piracy Data

Most media and entertainment companies lack insights into global OTT audiences, despite how fast the business is growing.

The industry spends $200 billion annually making and marketing content with little in the way of audience insights, and $800 million is spent every year on TV pilots that aren’t picked up (with the most successful TV networks seeing only two of 15 shows perform well). And with production costs up an average of 20% every year, having better audience data can be a huge advantage.

For Tobias Queisser, co-founder and CEO of Cinelytic, an unexpected answer to that has been found in the place Hollywood hates the most: piracy. Real-time insights from peer-to-peer sharing can inform decisions around packaging, financing and marketing content, allowing for a better understanding of what global audiences want, and how to better target them.

“Piracy doesn’t following windowing … once a high-quality version exists [illegally] we can begin tracking the data, and predict performance,” Queisser said, speaking March 4 during a breakout session at the Smart Content Summit “We can work on it as tracking data, and it’s also helpful with predictive analytics, to predict demographics, audience sizes and more.”

Cinelytic offers a unique predictive dataset, based on P2P consumer behavior, which has grown by 100 million demand expressions every day since 2018. The dataset serves as a proxy for digital OTT demand across all platforms, and offers real-time audience intelligence insights into what consumers are watching. Audience size, location and demographics are all covered.

Legal and illegal file sharing data is collected by Cinelytic’s proprietary technology, and 100 million content download and streaming transactions are recorded daily. What the company has found is that that data highly correlates to SVOD and OTT data that’s available.

Cinelytic has partnered with an industry leading demographics data solution to derive detailed audience insights from the P2P content data, allowing the company to not only identify what content global audiences want, but also who these audiences is, allowing for better targeting.

Already, Cinelytic’s model has helped clients: A major TV network had to decide whether to renew a running TV show, with declining U.S. ratings. The P2P data helped to identify long-term consumption trends internationally, to support the network’s decision to renew. The show ended up becoming one of their most popular and profitable series internationally, and added revenue of $56 million after it was renewed.

The Smart Content Summit was sponsored by TapeArk and Seagate, Whip Media Group, EIDR, BeBanjo, Cinelytic, Frame.io, Sohonet, Spherex and Sony, and produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Smart Content Council.

Click here to download audio of the presentation. Click here to download the presentation PDF.