Frankfurt, May 17, 2021. AGF Videoforschung now reports monthly streaming hit lists on its website. These answer the question of which TV programmes have the highest net streaming coverage per provider during this period. They also show how much additional net coverage a programme shown in linear TV gets from streaming. Convergent net coverages for TV and streaming show the viewership of a programme across content delivery channels and devices.
“With these hit lists AGF answers one of the questions most frequently asked by programme directors and the advertising market: How many people in total saw this TV programme across all channels? AGF can answer this question for all offerings it measures, once again meeting an urgent demand from the market,” says Kerstin Niederauer-Kopf, Chairperson of the Executive Management of AGF Videoforschung.
AGF has thus further refined the data obtained from the television world, and added to its highly-regarded daily TV programme hit lists. Since it is of interest to see which content from participating broadcasters performs particularly well, for each provider under measurement AGF offers two streaming hit lists, one each for the currently most in-demand target groups of viewers aged 3 and up, and adults aged 14 to 49. These lists are ranked by net coverage for streaming only and also contain the convergent (TV + streaming) coverage. The basis is TV programmes with a minimum length of 5 minutes.
Usually viewing participation including viewing duration is used to compare TV programmes, but the new hit lists use net coverage. Net coverage is a very robust and commonly used performance value for streaming, which has the potential to give AGF the ability to include in its data higher aggregates like product or programme brand placements, in a useful and comparable way. In order to ensure fair comparison with other streaming services that are not measured by AGF and often have no time-referenced key indicators, AGF will provide net coverage based on the 0/1 method on its website. This shows the number of people reached by video content at least once for a second. Multiple viewings by the same person are counted only once in measuring net coverage. “In the focus of AGF reporting are key indicators that enable simple comparison, including easier comparison with offerings from other sources not under our measurement,” notes Kerstin Niederauer-Kopf.
Since 2017 AGF has measured streaming data on a monthly basis, and since 2019 this information has also been available on a daily basis to customers receiving data from AGF. Streaming content is not viewed linearly but at a time of the viewer’s choosing, so performance builds more slowly than is the case for TV. “While in linear TV the live character of the programme still plays an important role, in streaming there is no set starting time. Content in media libraries and on websites is accessed during the days and weeks after it is uploaded. By the same token, many programmes are available for streaming even before they are broadcast on TV, so the success of a format can only be measured with a certain time delay,” explains Kerstin Niederauer-Kopf. Therefore, AGF has decided to report monthly TV+streaming hit lists.
In order to enable a fair comparison for programmes that go online only at the end of the month, the hit lists also take into account streaming viewing in the first seven days of the following month (“convergent +7”). This has the approval of the AGF committees which include representatives of broadcasters, media agencies and advertisers. Since data production in its own right takes eight days, going forward the monthly hit lists will be posted on the 16th of every following month at https://www.agf.de/en/data/video-streaming-data.
Reporting of streaming hit lists for TV-based content on the AGF website is the first step in making available to a broader public data that is already used by broadcasters, data analysts, media agencies and advertisers. Niederauer-Kopf: “AGF is planning to develop answers to further questions, for example concerning viewing volumes or web-only offerings, or a more comprehensive presentation of data for all videos belonging to a format or programme brand.”