Parrot Analytics partners with academic institutions to study the impact of OTT platforms and streaming services

Parrot Analytics has joined the University of Chicago, McGill University and Duke University to study the impact of OTT platforms and streaming services in shaping communities of taste around the globe and the dynamics between local audiences and the global accessibility of content. “We are thrilled to be a part of this study to help academia understand the factors that go into making a local piece of content an international success, impacting communities and audiences across the globe”, said Alejandro Rojas, VP of Applied Analytics at Parrot Analytics. “What made Squid Game such a hit, and what can we learn about the global attention economy by carefully reconstructing one of its recent media successes? Through comparison with this larger background and other high demand shows, we hope to explain the distinctiveness of its viral success and what it says about the potential of SVOD services like Netflix to capture global media attention.”

The collaboration is between the University of Chicago’s departments of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) and Cinema and Media Studies, Duke University’s department of English and McGill University’s department of English. It is funded by the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago. "What kinds of shows achieve cross-regional success? What is the relation of these shows to local production and consumption markets? What can more fine-grained analysis of demand signals tell us about these larger dynamics?” said Professor Richard Jean So from McGill University. “For all of these questions, we need Parrot Analytics’ robust global audience demand data to understand how new distribution platforms are influencing taste and consumption patterns.”

Parrot Analytics’ suite of global audience demand data measurement will help the universities’ collaboration, which aims to understand how global shows achieve cross-regional success and the role played by distribution platforms in influencing audience tastes and consumption patterns. “Our initial case study will investigate Squid Game to better understand the dynamics of its viral success,” said Hoyt Long, professor of Japanese literature, from the University of Chicago. “We propose to do this by collecting digital trace data from three different regions (US, Japan, and South Korea) to analyze audience response patterns in each region and the kinds of discussions it triggered.”

"Scholars have long been interested in the cultural reception of books, film, and television, but we haven’t had access to extensive audience data across nations and languages. Approaches such as ours aim to unite quantitative methods of cultural study with qualitative understandings of the meaning and impact of television shows in different communities around the world,"  says Aarthi Vadde, Professor of English at Duke University.