How Big Data is Changing the Entertainment Industry

Featured article by Aleksandra, Independent Technology Author

Big data and analytics play an increasingly key role in the development of the entertainment and leisure industries. Today, we have more statistics at our fingertips than ever before, with vast data volumes continuously building up online daily through smartphones, social media, and many other platforms and applications. As a result, there are some significant benefactors within the entertainment industry when it comes to leveraging big data, resulting in increased profitability and improved connections and experiences with users and customers.

Historically, media in the form of entertainment was consumed in very limited formats — basically television and cinema. However, today, there is a myriad of entertainment platforms thanks to the internet — including on-demand and live streaming, pay-per-view services, and much more. The delivery of content across these new platforms enables publishers and broadcasters to gather significant amounts of user data to get a better understanding of audience behavior and content preferences.

For instance, YouTube has compiled big data on its user base, discovering that the vast majority of its audience are aged between 18 and 34 years old. The social platform has also been able to determine the most popular length of the video and the favored devices for streaming. This is all geared towards helping YouTube syndicate entertainment that’s aligned closer than ever to their audience’s preferences.

The entertainment business is based on customer demand. Nothing excites media companies more than the churn of their customers or user base. In order to manage and nurture a profitable customer base for the long-term, the advent of big data has enabled the entertainment industry to better understand why their customers subscribe and unsubscribe to their products. It’s never been easier for publishers and broadcasters to get a handle on what makes the ideal subscription model in terms of pricing, content, and delivery modes.

Big data is utilized to improve the customer experience even in places as rich as Las Vegas. The casinos that line the famous strip use member schemes and frequent player cards to help determine which of their customers have committed the most money and table time or electronic slot machine time within their premises, thus qualifying for a customer reward. All the customer has to do is swipe a machine with their card or hand it to the dealer for activation and each time they play a record is kept in the casino system.

Even if it’s a free drink or an all-you-can-eat buffet on the house, it all helps to create a wonderful experience for tourists visiting Sin City. On the subject of slot machines, you don’t get much bigger than the data collected from the random number generators used to create billions of different spin combinations; thus enabling casinos to offer enormous cash payouts on these “progressive” machines.

Traditionally, advertising and media revenues have been largely dependent upon programmatic advertising — random placement of adverts in the hopes that viewers like what they see and act on it. Through the analytics of big data, advertisers and businesses can work smarter to ascertain specific preferences of customers in terms of content and the way that content is consumed. The end result is the delivery of higher ad conversion rates with more efficient targeting and a personalized real-time media experience.