OFFICIAL STATEMENT REGARDING BARB SVOD MEASUREMENT – 2022 UPDATE

News and Opinion / 17th October 2022

Digital i welcomes the launch of BARB’s SVOD measurement system on the 29^th November, 2021. Equally, Digital i welcomes the new openness and transparency shown by Netflix and other streaming platforms that have agreed to be measured by BARB in November 2022.

We believe that the datasets are complementary and are committed to providing both SoDA and BARB SVOD data to our clients depending on the specific needs of their project or analytics teams.

BARB gives a comprehensive view of what British households are watching on their TV sets and doing inside their homes.

In contrast, SoDA focuses on the activity of SVOD accounts across all devices in and out of the home.

Digital i sees this move for BARB as an important step for the UK media industry.

During the first few months of BARB’s service launch, we underwent an intensive exercise of due diligence to ensure that the variations between the viewing figures are compounded, explained, and corroborated. BARB’s TV set measurement held a high correlation with the viewing we measured attributed to a TV set.

SoDA currently covers Netflix and Prime Video viewing in 15 regions (UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Poland, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina).

We have further plans to expand to the US, Canada and the Pacifc throughout 2023.

As well as expanding the geographic coverage, our primary goal is to cover multinational services, rather than focussing on local variance. This is to achieve our aim of creative a global SVOD measurement system.

We do this by building a high-quality managed panel whilst deploying a new form of digital measurement which leverages cutting-edge software and data science techniques.

 The Digital i team is here to help explain the differences in the data and advise which datasets are necessary in line with client project requirements. We are committed to providing the data you most need to answer your stakeholder’s most pertinent questions.

If you want to know anymore about this, please get in touch.