“The New Mr. Peabody and Sherman Show,” is a 13-episode half-hour series is based on the ’60s four-minute shorts from animation legend Jay Ward that first aired in his “Rocky & Bullwinkle Show” from 1961 -64. In those shorts, bespectacled canine Mr. Peabody and his adopted kid compadre Sherman get into the way-back machine, “WABAC” and travel through time to meet famous historical personages. “The New Mr. Peabody and Sherman Show” is inspired by the original shorts and  from the 2014 feature film by the same name. In the series they host a zany late-night comedy show broadcast from their swanky penthouse in front of a live studio audience where they interview historical figures. Guests from bygone eras will include Mozart, Napoleon and Edgar Allan Poe, as Mr. Peabody and Sherman embark on new adventures using their famous WABAC machine. “We loved the straight-up lampooning of historical figures,” Executive Producer Dave Smith said. “We mixed it up a lot, while retaining the comedy of the Jay Ward show.”

Beasts of No Nation is a 2015 West African war drama film based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Uzodinma Iweala. The novel follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in an unnamed West African country. The film stars Idris Elba, Ama K. Abebrese, Abraham Attah, Grace Nortey, David Dontoh and Opeyemi Fagbohungbe. It was screened in the main competition section of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival where it won the Marcello Mastroianni Award.

“Hemlock Grove” is in its third season, Season1 launched in April of 2013 and Season 2 followed a year later. The show examines the strange happenings in Hemlock Grove, a fictional town in Pennsylvania. Roman Godfrey, heir to the town’s wealthy Godfrey family, befriends the town’s newcomer, Peter Rumancek. Recent brutal murders in the town have stirred up rumors, and the two work together to shed light on the case while also hiding their own dark secrets.

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Using this data helps Netflix to validate the strategy of releasing a whole season at one time. None of the shows Netflix studied hooked viewers with the pilot and in two cases, “Arrow” and “How I Met Your Mother” it didn’t happen until episode 8.

“Given the precious nature of primetime slots on traditional TV, a series pilot is arguably the most important point in the life of the show,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said. “However, in our research of more than 20 shows across 16 markets, we found that no one was ever hooked on the pilot. This gives us confidence that giving our members all episodes at once is more aligned with how fans are made.”

 Read more here:

 http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-tv-show-data-viewer-episode-study-1201600746/

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The two other activities that ranked higher were sleeping and working, coming in ranked at number four, Netflix is just behind all other leisure activities and far ahead of the twenty five minutes we spent on childcare. Not exactly sure what happens when you factor in watching and eating together or watching in the bedroom, but clearly its taken a lead in what people are doing with their viewing time.

Between 2012 and 2015, the use of Netflix streaming increased from 38% of US adult broadband users to 50%. If Netflix is cutting into the use of legacy pay-TV services, as some argue, it’s not obvious, as it declined only minimally, from 87% to 84%.

You can find a summary of the report at exstreamist.com

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“A lot of the heavy lifting of getting audiences to the show is done with the user interface. We can launch a lot of these shows without spending any marketing. We can use the merchandising to draw the audience in. Marketing spends we do mostly to attract subscribers to join Netflix. The actual viewing of shows, the user interface is driving almost all of that. So marketing is good to plant a seed in the culture, awards season spending, so we see it a lot different in New York and LA.”

Read the whole interview

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“The change in behavior is stunning. The use of streaming and smartphones just year-on-year is double-digit increases,” Alan Wurtzel, NBCUniversal’s audience research chief, told The Post. “I’ve never seen that kind of change in behavior.”      Read More

Why this matters: as the erosion of traditional liner television viewing accelerates, the urgency for new & accepted techniques in audience measurement becomes ever more critical —  if great content is to be anything other than a charitable / voluntary affair.

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from Digital Bucket:

I have a place on my phone where I try and jot down recommendations for “must see” entertainment: movies, TV series, specials, blogs – just about any video content that has been enthusiastically suggested. I intended to create a self-styled Dewey Decimal To-View List of sorts. The sad truth is that my shorthanded watch-list is a veritable junk drawer of disassociated titles, partial names, and unexplained details, that must have seemed helpful at the time. But in my moment of viewing need – there never seems to be quite enough attributes to help me make good choices. Thus the fame factor.

I often make my viewing choices based on the celebrity fame of the actor, author or director involved. I’m also brand conditioned enough to have leanings toward certain studios or networks, but my sense of fame is the overriding influence. It has served me well, even as I consider my short form internet viewing options.

However, I’m questioning if it is still a valid, or manageable filter for my ever growing to-view list.

Here Today, Gone – Today

Of course, fame has never been a foolproof guide to great viewing. We’ve all been caught off guard by the uncomfortable realization that the fame was, well, rooted in luck, or the aging celebrity burn victim look (unfortunate ambitious cosmetic tweaks). Or, even the sometimes unimaginable misbehavior that celebrity seems to breed (the spice of fame – I guess). I do expect some of that when using fame as my true viewing north. However – my current issue is that I’m becoming overwhelmed by the shear quantity of fame out there and my inability to incorporate it all as a guide.

As NYT’s Alex Williams recently chronicled in 15 Minutes of Fame? More Like 15 Seconds of Nanofame,  not only fame’s huge growth in numbers, but also it’s perishability; a transition from the celebrity of “microfame” to “nanofame”.  He suggests that the power and length of fame continues to diminish in the internet age.  I agree, thus my dilemma.

Left: Perez Hilton: snarky celebrity and pop-culture blogger.
Right: Left Shark: awkward fish-suited backup dancer during the Super Bowl halftime show. Credit J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times; Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It all gets very interesting when you consider what the face of fame might look like in the next decade- but that’s another post. When it comes to making the best viewing choices, you could argue that I should cast fame aside. Or- we just quantify a new sort of celebrity fame. Let’s not only consider the scale of one’s fame, but also their longevity of ongoing fame. Of course name it: Sticky fame? O’Reliable fame? Tenacious fame?

And even with Reliable Fame, what about binge viewing of series? Could one argue that a Sunday spent watching a year of Claire Dane’s work be as nanofame as the Sunday exposure to Katy Perry’s “Left Shark”? God I hope not. But such questions will arise. In the mean time, as I add Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, to my personal watch-list, the annotation will certainly include: Cruise, Travolta.

Editor’s note:  The barriers to facilitating content discovery are getting higher all the time. Here at Digital Bucket, one of our big interests is how great stories, and as a result great content, can be discovered.  It is a confounding fact that the very ecosystem that has created all this rich new content – has also made its discovery nearly impossible.

It may not always be easy to find – but great content endures. Great stories are still valued and eventually – hopefully- discovered. Over the coming weeks we will continue to explore the solutions, the resources and how viewers find their way to great content. We’d love to hear how your precious “viewing time” choices are made.  Please leave thoughts or links in comments.

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With a market capitalization currently north of $ 27 Billion Wall Street darling Netflix has a few options your average TV production company does not: Debt issuance. Netflix just issued another $1.5 BILLION in debt, which according to Stream Daily will be used at least in part to help fund new original content. After all, bringing House of Cards back for a third season certainly won’t come cheaply. Variety has the details.

by Todd Spangler, Variety:

Netflix is raising $1.5 billion in additional long-term debt — up from its original $1 billion target, announced earlier Monday — the proceeds from which the company said it plans to use for content acquisitions and other general purposes, including potential acquisitions.

The company late Monday announced the pricing of an offering of $700 million aggregate principal amount of 5.50% senior notes due 2022 and $800 million aggregate principal amount of 5.875% senior notes due 2025.

Netflix said the sale of the debt is expected to close Feb. 5, 2015, subject to usual closing conditions.

Read More @ Variety.com

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Since going public just over a decade ago, Netflix has changed the rules about where, how and when TV shows and movies get watched. And more recently by making huge bets producing some of the most creative, dynamic and critically acclaimed series on “television”  in-house, Netflix has also redefined how shows gets made in the first place. In a field as competitive and risky as producing world-class original broadcast content, how has such a young company managed to find so much success?  It’s all in the algorithm. And its name is Ted.

by Tim Wu, The New Yorker:

[excerpt] … Studios and television networks have long made decisions about what to produce based on the intuitions of a limited number of executives. Television studios have Nielson ratings, and movie studios have box-office sales, to help guide them. But those are relatively simple metrics, and notoriously unreliable; as the screenwriter William Goldman famously said, “nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.” As with the arrival of sabermetrics in baseball or the rise of pollsters in politics, the potential for the quants to change the industry—to really figure out what people want to watch—is clear.

Netflix and its chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, have been the most outspoken proponents of data-driven programming, which they say was behind the company’s biggest successes, such as “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black.” Soon after the début of “House of Cards,” David Carr, writing in the Times, pronounced that “Big bets are now being informed by Big Data.” In 2013, Kevin Spacey, the star of the show, said that Netflix had come to him and said, “We believe in you. We’ve run our data and it tells us that our audience would watch this series. We don’t need you to do a pilot. How many do you wanna do?”

Read More @ The New Yorker.com

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Feel free to ignore original post.

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