Nielsen’s Gracenote recently launched a new dataset for streaming services that’s meant to boost audience engagement and tune-in by delivering factoids and relatable comparisons about content, hoping to pique viewer interest and influence decisions on what to watch.
The dataset, dubbed “Watch Prompts”, can also help provide more personalized experiences as it’s designed to be paired with viewer preference and consumption behavior data that video platforms have. It complements Gracenote’s basic program metadata and Video Descriptors products, adding information about TV shows and film through the use of both automated machine learning and a human touch.
The impetus for Watch Prompts is all about more effective content discovery, which helps attract and retain viewers, to ultimately drive engagement on platforms. Success for streamers, in part, is tied to a positive user experience where viewers can regularly find and engage with content that they want to watch. And for ad-supported services, engagement or time spent can also have impacts on efforts to attract and drive advertising revenue. Disney, for example, has recently put strong focus on new features aimed at increasing the time users spend on its streaming apps, per the WSJ. Earlier this year it integrated Hulu content into Disney+ for certain subscribers to create a more unified, single-app content experience that’s also meant to drive increased engagement.
But streamers are striving for more engagement in a landscape with no shortage of content options for viewers to choose from and an environment where consumers value services with easy discovery but say platform-delivered recommendations don’t always hit the mark. Survey data released by Hub Entertainment Research earlier this year showed 61% of consumers reported they’re more likely to pick a TV platform that makes it easy to discover new shows, but just 10% said streaming service recommendations consistently match their interests.
Through the new dataset Gracenote’s looking to boost titles with interesting tidbits that give a little something extra in the hopes of encouraging and motivating viewers to land on a piece of content to watch as they consider various TV shows and films.
There are three main facets Gracenote is bringing with Watch Prompts:
Critical facts - This includes highlighting prominent award wins and praise from TV and film critics to help show evidence of a title’s quality. For example, HBO’s “Succession” information page could showcase 13 Emmy Award wins, including in the “Outstanding Drama” category to inform a potential viewer about critical acclaim and influence them to give it a try.
Talent Spotlight – providers can showcase popular actors and creators that appeal to viewer preferences.
Content comparisons – these provide relatable analogies to other films and TV shows based on thematically similar content, which can give viewers a better idea of what they might be getting into. Gracenote used the example of the “Barbie”, where a title page for the movie using Watch Prompts could display the film as “Legally Blonde” meets “The Lego Movie.”
The Gracenote Watch Prompts come pre-packaged but it’s up to the service how to present individual prompts to individual users based on the platform’s own established rules. User preferences and previous viewing behavior can impact which Watch Prompt snippet a service surfaces to a specific viewer, but the content comparison prompts aren’t dynamically generated in the sense that one user of a service would see a different comparison than another.
That said, Gracenote aims to provide multiple Watch Prompts for individual titles so that services can have more than one option to display to personalize the experience. For example, a viewer who’s a fan of award-winning British programming might see a snippet highlighting a film’s British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) rather than a content comparison or Watch Prompt that showcases a favorite actor.
“Streaming services are challenged to continually enhance the user experiences they offer to delight viewers, increase time spent and reduce churn,” said Trent Wheeler, chief product officer at Gracenote, in a statement. “Watch Prompts leverages the expertise of Gracenote’s human editors along with scalability enabled by machine learning to deliver an entirely new dataset that will help our customers evolve and meet these challenges.”
A Gracenote spokesperson told StreamTV Insider that its “human in the loop” approach to content comparisons to provide a reference point for viewers is a critical component of Watch Prompts and differentiates the dataset from other machine-generated metadata offerings in terms of quality and resonance.
As the spokesperson described, Gracenote’s process uses both machine learning and humans to come up with comparable content, which can be based on characteristics like genre, mood, or stylistic similarity. Machine-generated comparisons, or pairs, are reviewed by real people who decide “based on familiarity with entertainment content and editorial judgment which combinations provide the best frames of reference.” Those results are then used to keep training algorithms so that they can get iteratively better in terms of relevance and suitability over time.
Watch Prompts from Gracenote are on display at IBC in Amsterdam, which kicks off today, and the company is in active conversations with customers about the new dataset. It expects showcasing at IBC to spark commercial engagement and is looking for opportunities to work with streaming providers to test out the new dataset product.
The vendor, through its metadata services, already works with many major streaming service and platform providers. The Nielsen unit has marked recent expansions in both personnel and products. In July, Gracenote named former Snapchat executive Jared Grusd as its first chief executive officer. Over the summer it also jumped into the contextual CTV advertising space, aiming to provide a standard taxonomy for ad buyers and sellers that can help advance and scale ad targeting based on content viewers are watching.