TV RATINGS IN 60 SECONDS

IS IT POSSIBLE TO PREDICT A HIT SHOW FROM THE FIRST 60 SECONDS?

When video content costs this much to produce, you better be sure it's worth it. 

In 2018, a record 495 scripted TV series were aired, twice as many shows as 2010. Let's be honest: how much of this content do you really want to watch? That's where the extraordinarily rich data collected by the Immersion Value Measurement platform helps content creators. 

The platform identifies shows that will capture an audience, streamlines the editing process, and directs distributors to the demographics who valued content the most. Measuring value throughout the production process increases entertainment quality, audience share, and ultimately audience enjoyment.

We wondered if we could make the process even faster.

Our recent study on Predicting Hit Songs showed that Immersion's output predicted Spotify streams with 92% accuracy after people listened to new songs for one minute. 

If a minute of our Value Score was enough for songs, could a short duration of our Value Score predict TV ratings? Our analysis of 25 unscripted TV shows identified ratings hits with 84% accuracy by measuring value while people watched the first act of each show, usually 8-9 minutes. 

That approach generated over half a million data points. We decided to put the richness of neurologic data to the test by using only the first minute of value to see if it would predict hit shows.

This is a seriously hard challenge because it would ignore 87% of the data we had used in our first analysis.