The OTT giant Netflix has teamed up with the British TV rating agency ‘Broadcasters Audience Research Board’ (BARB) to measure Netflix’s daily streaming numbers as well as report on its monthly reach and share of total identified viewing. The collaboration between the streaming platform and the UK agency will start this November.
Disney+ also signed up with BARB, which introduced streaming numbers to its reporting.“BARB is the first industry-owned audience currency in the world that Netflix has joined,” says the announcement. “Back in 2019, at the RTS conference in Cambridge, I welcomed the idea of Netflix audiences being measured independently. We’ve kept in touch with BARB since then and are pleased to commit to its trusted measurement of how people watch television in the UK,” said Reed Hastings, Co-CEO of Netflix.
At present, Netflix has nearly 221 million subscribers worldwide. BARB will publicly report the monthly reach and share of viewing for broadcaster groups and subscription video-on-demand (SVOD)/advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD) services which account for more than 0.5 percent of total identified viewing. BARB will report Netflix viewing every day at both a service and a program level to its clients.
The data will hugely impact the content available on Netflix. For any OTT platform, going public with viewing data is significant as it will point to how much confidence the streamer has regarding the quality of its content, also revealing which shows are being watched and which titles are total flops — at least in the U.K.
It was reported in May 2022 that Netflix’s long-term subscribers are canceling their subscriptions and as much as 13 percent of cancellations in the last quarter have come from subscribers who have been on the platform for more than three years. It also lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Following this, the company Netflix has joined hands with tech-giant Microsoft to roll out its first ad-supported subscription offering. However, the streaming platform later confirmed that its ad-supported tier won’t have all of Netflix’s licensed content.
