Malayalam star Prithviraj, basking in the success of this recent film ‘Bro Daddy’, recently tweeted some interesting ‘data’.
Remember: Bro Daddy was released directly on Disney+ Hotstar.
Consider the kinds of ‘data’ used by producers of films as part of the movie’s promotional efforts.
1. Review snippets
2. Amount of money collected in X time period (usually an opening weekend)
3. A famous person liking/appreciating the film
4. Number of days the movie remains in a theater (as a symbol of interest) – the best example of this is ‘100 days’ as a previously popular yardstick; this has now been taken over by ‘100 crores’ (and X00 crores)
5. Number of X days in Y centers (as in ‘100 days in 200 theaters’)
6. Number of ‘housefull’ days!
Now, consider what the data shared by Prithviraj mean.
The first point is: ‘Highest first day subscription across all languages’.
There could be so many questions about this! Let me start:
- Is this the number of people who subscribed to Disney+ Hotstar for the first time and watched Bro Daddy as their first-ever content on the platform (which could explain why they subscribed in the first place to some extent, though it need not be so unilateral)?
- Is this the number of people who landed on the Disney+ Hotstar subscription page from a Bro Daddy song/trailer and signed up (with the intent presumed from the last attributed page they were in)?
- And all this just for the 24 hours when the movie dropped on the platform?
The second point is: ‘Second highest watchtime on first day’
Meaning?
- Among all the movies and shows that dropped on Disney+ Hotstar (all languages?), this film got the most ‘watchtime’ on the first day?
- Does ‘watchtime’ include people who watched the film fully, or those who spent the most time watching it?
- This leads me to wonder about the ‘first highest watchtime on first day’, but I’m guessing we won’t get that information.
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Broadly, I like the fact that our filmmakers are innovating with the way they frame ‘success’, porting it from one medium (theaters) to another (streaming).
The larger objective behind the need to find such data is the same – to induce FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). That is, ‘So many people, as defined by the days a film has stayed in theaters, or as defined by the amount of money it has made, have made this film worth their while and I haven’t yet?’.
For streaming-first film releases, there are several constraints compared with their theatrical cousins. For starters, the ‘opening weekend’ concept goes straight out of the window however much filmmakers want to desperately hold on to it – this was the biggest target when theaters were thriving, single-screen or multiplexes. All the FOMO was being driven towards the opening weekend after the theatrical stay of films was severely curtailed as the avenues of entertainment started to increase due to satellite TV and the internet.
With streaming releases, filmmakers could roll out staggering digital/offline marketing campaigns for specific durations (first 4 weekends, for example) and see results. Films could also gain from long-tail effect – some topical event triggering interest in a film that holds that theme.
The day-count or money-count too goes out of the window! On streaming, it doesn’t matter how many days a film stays on a platform – the common assumption is that a film is always on (though platforms like Netflix purge titles frequently). As for money, unlike theatrical releases where producers gain money, with a streaming release, producers get paid a lump sum by the platform in one go! So, you cannot expect them to market a new film with, ‘Rs. 200 Crores paid by Disney+ Hotstar for X film’ 🙂 That’s not the equivalent of many, many individual people paying Rs. 200 Crores together to many, many theaters.
Unlike the chain of theatres that are involved in an extensive offline release, the online platform is singular and privately held, with no gaps for film enthusiasts to enter and collect data.
Instead, consider what Netflix assumes as a ‘view’. Back in 2019, a ‘view’ was a person watching more than 70% of a title’s run time including credits.
In Q4 of 2019, Netflix changed it to ‘Chose to watch and did watch for at least 2 minutes’!
Compared to watching 70 minutes of a title, ‘at least 2 minutes’ sounds preposterous, but that’s Netflix. The platform’s reasoning for using this logic exists too, though we can balk at it at the same time – Netflix uses the 2-minute view because for them it constitutes intentionality. Meaning: someone consciously chose to watch something after being sufficiently interested/intrigued by promos or title cards (or whatever). If they drop watching it within 2 minutes, it may say less about the title’s quality and more about the fact that this was not something they had intended to watch.
The closest equivalent to understanding intentionality is perhaps buying a theater ticket to watch a film. The purchase of a ticket is what is counted by box office professionals, not that you had indeed watched the film using that ticket (and physically filled a seat)! Purchase of a ticket is intentionality, in that case.
There are several counter questions I can anticipate but not get responses to.
For instance, would people sit through a movie they don’t like only because they have paid for the ticket? Of course, this happens all the time! With a streaming platform, since you haven’t paid for the individual title and only for the whole platform’s access, you may be far less generous with what you sit through – because there’s always something else to watch at the same time.
On the other hand, it’s also considerably easy to be more patient with titles on OTT platforms because you want to get a hang of what’s going on and not judge something that you arrived at after a lot of deliberation so quickly. For instance, you may sit through 10-15 minutes of a film or the first episode of a series to then decide if you want to continue. So, 2 minutes seems… pretty random, to me.
In October 2021, Netflix changed the definition of ‘view’ yet again: now, it is ‘total of hours watched by all member accounts‘.
In the normal, old-world where companies are judged by revenues and not valuations, a view would simply mean someone who has watched a film fully once. This is common sense. But with OTTs, that’s not how a view is defined.
If you look beyond the nebulous definitions of what a ‘view’ counts, what could producers use in the promos?
- The individual number of people who have watched a film? This has never been used with theatrical releases and hence there is no comparison. But Netflix has tried this once, with Bird Box.
- The total number of hours spent watching the movie on a platform?
- The movie that was paused the least (to signify consistent interest)?
I don’t know how open OTT platforms are to sharing nuanced data with our filmmakers. I didn’t even know that Disney+ Hotstar was sharing information like the ones Prithviraj shared on social media! This is not something you could expect from Netflix, but Hotstar sharing such information is very interesting. And note that the information was not just about viewership, but also about subscription… almost trying to bring parity with the ticket-sales metric in some warped way.
But we may still be missing the equivalent of a ‘100 days’ and ‘100 crores’, in the kind of FOMO they invoke and what they signify in one stroke effortlessly that denotes ‘massive interest’.
For starters, it won’t be something that is directly comparable with theatrical release data points because the ecosystems are not comparable at all. It has to be something far beyond what we expect because our general expectations are based on theatrical release data only.
To get the brevity of a simple numerical value that denotes huge interest, there are a few contours:
- time spent watching (an opening weekend 2.5 lakh hours hit? – Assume 100,000 people watched fully a 2.5 hours’ movie)
- number of people who watched (an opening weekend 25 lakh viewers hit?)
- number of new people who watched (an opening weekend 2 lakh new subscribers hit?)
- steady number of unique viewers for a specific period of time (1 lakh viewers every day for 25 days?)
But all these lack a common understanding the way a ‘100 Days’ or ‘100 Crores’ evoke – they are not dependent on the number of people in the country/state, but streaming numbers would invariably be based on their own subscriber numbers that vary wildly and usually held closely.