"WDR" – A Watch Data Record

We are seeing an unprecedent increase in consumption of content over the internet. Emergence of massive number of OTT (over the top) platforms and now FAST (Free Ad supported streaming TV are helping to fulfill the unsatiable hunger for good content. As Media industry adopts to this rapid increase of platforms it also must deal with the complexities in terms of getting the content from script to shoot to stream. Just to get some perspective of the scale, here are few important numbers:

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Over last 5 years* –

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The average number of minutes a consumer watches videos has increased by 249% from 3.5B mins per day to 12.2B mins.

The Over-the-Top (OTT) video market has grown significantly in the last five years.?The number of users has increased by 45%, from 2.4 billion in 2018 to 3.5 billion in 2023.

In 2023, ad spending on AVOD services is projected to be worth $47 billion, almost double its 2018 value.

The number of digital video viewers is projected to increase annually and reach nearly 3.5 billion by 2023.

The number of devices connected to IP networks is expected to be more than three times the global population by 2023.

*all the above data was sourced from google generative AI platform.

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There are three main avenues for streaming platforms to generate revenues – subscriptions, advertising, and hybrid models. While as a consumer we are enjoying the content on the streaming platform in the background there are deals in play between platforms and content producers, platforms and advertisers, content producers having direct contracts with advertisers, deals with actor agencies, deals with brands and all these get a piece of the revenue. There are few important terms to make a note of “runs”, “reach”, “frequency” and finally “attribution”.

• Runs are primary the evidence of a content or ad played by subscribers.
• Reach means the number of people exposed to a piece of content at least once in a specified period, whether that be an hour, day, week.
• Frequency means?the average number of times an advertisement is placed in front of the reached population.
• Attribution means ability to measure the conversions by creative, geo, publisher, date, device, channel, number of exposures, time between exposure and conversion. Basically, it measures the effectiveness of the ad campaign.

The industry is grappling with the problem of non-standardization. Each platforms has its own format to report the data. The content owners sometimes must deal with 15 different formats from 15 platforms, the issue becomes even more complex when the title ids and descriptions are different across the platforms and within content owners’ system making it a challenging task of matching the titles, matching the ads and of course individual format for run reports.

Same is the case with Advertisers who need to be first know whether the ad got played, how many saw it completely or partial, did their ad get played completely or got compromised due to the ad pod sizing, on which title was it played, customer profile and when? again there are different formats by each platform reporting this data.

I would like to propose that we could learn from telecom companies who have solved this problem long ago with a common data format for calls called CDR – call data record. Single universal data format to report the data of a call irrespective the service providers, geo, across all service providers.

A WDR – a Watch data record can be a universal format reported by every streaming platform. Like CDR – WDR can be a system of record whenever a subscriber or viewer does an action on the platform like logins, logouts, starts, pauses, stops, exits and experiences an error watching a content be it movies, tv series or an advertisement.

Like a CDR, a WDR can have fields like unique subscriber id, content id, action code, start time, stop time, location zip code, type of device used to watch, package plan, content provider id, advertiser id (if it is an ad), date, licensing id, genre, language, subtitling on/off and so on. These can immediately give additional checks and balances in case of any deviation to the current legal agreements. Additionally the industry should adopt EIDR to register every title be it a movie or ad title and WDR can then use the EIDR id to high the content title and ad title played.

Common WDR format will enormously help the media industry to remove the complexities and efforts needed today for reconciliation of data, generate invoice and clearing dues quicker.

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How do you implement WDR?

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It is technically feasible at the player level, since player is reacting to every user action, it can create a WDR for each action and can be pushed back on the cloud over the internet. Rest of the WDR fields can be immediately filled in the cloud and the complete WDR can be saved for future billing and reporting.

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How will WDR benefit?

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1.???? Once everyone generates a common data forward as a system of record for watch then it will create the path for standardization on data processing, reporting, revenue management and even dispute management. Content owners and advertisers will get a consistent system of records to process from all the streaming platforms. Streaming platform can agree on a common reporting format to share the aggregated system of records and need not invest on spending efforts on customized reports for content owners and advertisers

2.???? There is lot of discussion on common currency for advertising, with standard data format in form of WDR will help pave a way for calculation of a currency for advertising.

3.???? WDR will also help streaming companies to do better accurate billing and offer interesting package plans for subscribers just like telecom companies.

4.???? An interesting aspect that may come into play is “roaming charges”, today if am a streaming subscriber in US and travels to Middle East and still want to watch my content, if license rights are allowed, I should be able to watch the movie and may agree to roaming charges for the period of my travelling. This is not possible today but with WDR it will become

5.???? Financial Auditing and GDPR/CCPA and other privacy regulations also can be implemented via the WDR.

6.???? Another interesting implementation could be when a streaming platform runs under another a consolidated platform like Roku, WDR will be very helpful for billing mediation.

In my view Media industry is now well poised and matured to implement a common universal system of record for watch in the form of WDR (A Watch Data record).

From

Uday Ghare

Media Consultant

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<All the views in this white paper are my personal views>