Netflix Ratings Company Shuts Down Service
by EG
Netflix's ratings are about to get even less transparent.
Little more than a year after making headlines for professing to know how many users were watching Netflix's sprawling slate of scripted originals, veteran measurement company Symphony Advanced Media has halted its efforts to game the system. Its young VideoPulse service, which drew on a panel of 15,000 users, shut down over the weekend.
"We deeply regret that Symphony Advanced Media will be shutting down its VideoPulse service effective 4/16/2017," reads a statement on the website. "VideoPulse customers will be able to access historical data until 5/1/2017."
Symphony sparked a flurry of trend pieces when it let alleged Netflix "ratings" slip, at first though a January 2016 PowerPoint presentation by former NBCUniversal research chief Alan Wurtzel, and then started regularly releasing estimates of original series audiences over the course of the last year. Among the most illuminating stats delivered in that time were the number of Thanksgiving weekend Gilmore Girls bingers and the astronomical audience tally for the first season of Fuller House.
Read the rest of this article at The Hollywood Reporter.