Broadcast industry ‘wasting data potential’

The paper, Big Questions, Big Answers, explores the benefits of big data for broadcast and the future it has for the TV industry. Insights were based on interviews with key decision makers and executives from 14 media groups around the world.

“I would love to say we are very good with data but the reality is we are not yet and we are working hard to change that,” said Rohana Rozhan, CEO of Malaysian pay-TV company Astro.

The paper highlighted three broad findings:

• TV operators are now moving away from asset-based data – e.g. counts of subscribers or plays in a given time period – and towards behavioural data collected from panels or in real-time from viewers
• Behavioural data is seen as key to unlocking new insights by placing viewer habits in context
• All data collected can only become valuable “through intelligent transformation and interpretation”

“The potential offered by big data is immense,” said Niko Waesche, global lead of the media and entertainment industry at GfK. “Currently, everybody is engaged in data experimentation and there is a lot to fight for.”