How Web scraping and Big Data Analytics can be used to impact the Media and Entertainment industry

• Read original article here

Every industry in the world is moving towards data-driven decision making, then one of the most popular and highest grossing industries definitely has employed analytics and d... We are talking about the media and entertainment (M&E) industry. If you are associated with the industry in any way and your question is how to use analytics to maximize the potential in this industry across all domains, you are at the right place!

The increased technological and digital revolutions have caused a data-enabled revolution within the media and entertainment industry. You can see a perfect convergence of digital and analytical solutions in this industry.

Before we move on to how data analytics can be employed in a Video Production Company, let us understand its needs and priorities. The trends of media and entertainment industry are primarily driven by the changing needs of the digitally savvy audiences and their preferences. Most of us now want to use entertainment means not only to recreate and relax but also to stay on top of advancements, world events and our respective interest areas- all this while on the move!

Our fast-paced lives have pushed the entertainment industry to alter their content and the war of delivering it to us rapidly. While the primary intent of the industry lies in developing the best content for the audience, the media industry also tries to diversify into various channels for broadcasting information and entertainment content. Analytics can in fact steer media and entertainment towards burgeoning growth rates.

If we just look at some facts and numbers, we can see a staggering amount of data from social media and online media being pulled and processed. As of 2017, Facebook is reported to collect and process over 500 TB of data on a daily basis. The search business market leader, Google handles 3.5 Billion requests every day. Amazon is another member of the big data league that receives around 152 Million customers’ purchase data daily. Having said that, big data is definitely an essential tool for the entertainment and media industry.

There are three main areas where big data has the potential to disrupt the status quo and stimulate economic growth within the media and entertainment sectors:

Some critical applications of data analytics in the media and entertainment industry are:

Most of the data being spoken about in the analysis above is customer-centric or can be pulled from various media platforms. All this can be done using one tool- Web Data Scraping! Firms like Datahut can scrape data from multiple sources and store them in a structured file format. Social Media crawling, social listening, data scraping and web aggregators are not just jargons thrown around in the technical data-driven community. These are some of the tools and techniques used to scrape data from media platforms and websites.

To make it further accessible for you, we can assure that learning the basics of data gathering and analytics is not difficult! You have a lot of resources that can help you understand the technological asp.... For faster and efficient results, we at Datahut can offer you scalable solutions and services to convert all unstructured web data into structured data files.

A lot of this data, like Google search trends, is also available to the public for analyses and research. This data can either be pulled using APIs (application program interfaces) or be extracted using methods like web scraping.

Online media platforms like Netflix rely on data analytics and data-driven decision-making tools for almost all their operations. One of the most popular use-cases is where Netflix monitors reviews, trends and customer sentiments to gain an edge over the competitors. They have used this data in the past to gain complete partnership rights for a leading political drama show.

The online content platform has been able to crunch the vast amount of viewership data to study their viewers. Using this data gives them an in-depth and fine-grained analysis of viewers’ habits over millions of viewings of shows. Some fundamental insights that Netflix has obtained are the attributes or qualities that cause a particular show to be popular or how long viewers had viewed similar programs, through seasons and individual shows.

Warner Bros. had partnered with Accenture’s Datamart team, Aprimo to use software applications along with sales data in order to obtain quick access to actionable, accurate reports to support spend decisions, accumulate knowledge and experience. These applications can also help them apply actionable insights to refine subsequent movie marketing campaigns with past ones, thus improving invoice collection efficiencies.

In the music industry, a lot of artists and production houses use data on the audience’s listening preferences and sequences to design albums and market their creations effectively. Music platforms can also use data to generate insights on how to optimize the playlist for the maximum impact at live events.

Although the above examples reflect the industry trends at scale, the possibilities are not limited to these. Even online blogs and platforms that host articles can employ analytics to make vital strategic decisions. If you are a writer, who publishes content on platforms like Medium, would you not want to gain insights on what your followers or the readers think of your content? While the comments and reviews would give you a direct insight on the same, the sparsity and lack of such direct feedback can be covered up with stats of your articles. Metrics like the ratio of the number of readers to the number of views, basically tells you if your articles’ theme intersects with the readers’ interests.

Several other entertainment and lifestyle companies can use data to design advertising campaigns, discount programs, and marketing campaigns. This data can also be used for designing dynamic pricing campaigns.

The Weather Channel (TWC), a privately owned weather business co-owned by IBM uses Big Data and inquisitive analytics to observe and study customer behavior in specific weather conditions. It has been able to fabricate a marketplace, WeatherFX where sellers can advertise their products that show higher chances of selling in a particular weather scenario. Companies like BookMyShow predict a movies’ performance to design discount coupons and promotional offers for the audience.