New Social Media Software Predicts Disc Sales

14 Jun, 2011 By: Erik Gruenwedel

---

An Indianapolis technology company June 14 bowed new software that enables studios and content owners to determine a new release’s home entertainment success — and includes probable sales of DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

Fizziology (, which began tracking theatrical releases in 2009 via social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and related blog sites, extended the reach to include home entertainment — including evolving windows such as 28-day embargoes and premium video-on-demand.

To date, the company has a growing base of 250 theatrical releases from which it can track to within 95% accuracy consumer sentiment regarding a movie’s lifespan in the distribution food chain. Specifically, social media reaction to a particular title is processed via mathematical algorithms and then crunched by in-house social analysts, according to Fizziology co-founder Ben Carlson.

“We track all movies a full month ahead of the box office release,” Carlson said.

He said technology does most of the “heavy lifting” regarding data crunching, while Fizziology creates sophisticated search terms for individual movie titles, including factoring in the myriad ways users identify a particular title by name or the actors in it.

“I would love it if everyone would say Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; unfortunately, they usually don’t,” Carlson said. “They misspell ‘Caribbean,’ they’ll call it ‘Pirates 4,’ or ‘the new Johnny Depp movie.’”

The executive said the key to tracking volumes of data is recognizing patterns and anomalies that can represent future actions based on samplings of a few hundred pieces of data.

“They don’t need to read the 33,000 tweets that happened on [June 11] following the opening of Super 8 to know what the consumer sentiment was,” Carlson said. “Those analysts can score [the data] and flag what’s really driving the [online] conversation.”

He said that often what’s between the lines (so-called “breakout character”) in the data is what ultimately defines the commercial success of a film. Carlson said often the most germane consumer information occurs two weeks after a movie’s release.

“This is what audiences really thought. This is what they really cared about,” Carlson said. “It’s not just a reaction to the marketing. And that’s what’s going to determine whether someone buys that movie on DVD or Blu-ray.”

Indeed, Fizziology came within $1 million in predicting the weekend box office for sci-fi thriller Super 8, according to Carlson, who didn’t elaborate on what the movie might do in home entertainment.
 

Bookmark it: