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The Economist April 25th 2020 Business 57

Television isting programmes. Episode counts went The data economy
up, boosted by syndication contracts,
Medium and which generally stipulated that after a Tear down this
show had aired for a certain number of epi-
message sodes, usually 88 (or four seasons), the wall

rights to air it could be sold to third parties.
Streaming services like Netflix take the
LOS ANGELES opposite tack to syndication, luring view- SAN FRANCISCO
How technology and business models ers with fresh content that cannot be found A big member of big tech embraces
shape what tv shows look like open data
elsewhere (see Schumpeter). Many of the
es amours de la reine Élisabeth” (The 10m people who signed up for Disney’s new wo decades ago Microsoft was a by-
“LLoves of Queen Elizabeth), starring streaming platform by its first day last No- Tword for a technological walled garden.
Sarah Bernhardt, had four acts. So do many vember probably did so to watch “The Man- One of its bosses called free open-source
dramas—but in this case the narrative arc dalorian”, a Star Wars spin-off. In the first programs a “cancer”. That was then. On
was partly dictated by pedestrian concerns. nine months of 2019 seven of Netflix’s ten April 21st the world’s most valuable tech
When the film opened in New York’s Ly- most-watched original shows were in their firm joined a fledgling movement to liber-
ceum theatre in 1912 it came in four reels. debut season. Unless a show is a mega-hit ate the world’s data. The company plans to
Projector operators needed intervals to like hbo’s “Game of Thrones”, explains launch 20 data-sharing groups by 2022 and
switch from one to the next. In the past Leigh Brecheen, an entertainment lawyer give away some of its digital information,
century technology and business models in Hollywood, it now makes more financial including data it has gathered on covid-19.
have helped shape the message in moving sense to produce something new rather Microsoft is not alone in its newfound
pictures—nowhere more so than in televi- than renew something old. fondness for sharing in the age of the coro-
sion. Online streaming is no different. The upshot of the shift away from syn- navirus. “The world has faced pandemics
As tv conquered Western homes in the dication and towards streaming has been a before, but this time we have a new super-
1950s shows came in two main durations: decline in the average number of episodes power: the ability to gather and share data
half-an-hour and an hour. In America this per season. Based on figures for 34,000 tv for good,” Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Fa-
gave producers 20-odd or 40-odd minutes shows worldwide that debuted between cebook, a social-media giant, wrote in the
to play with after setting aside time for ads; 1955 and 2018, compiled by the tvdb, a web- Washington Post on April 20th. Despite the
of the 173 episodes of “Seinfeld”, a sitcom site, this fell from over 20 to under 11 (see eu’s strict privacy rules, some Eurocrats
that ran from 1989 to 1998, all but the two- chart). The number of seasons per series now argue that data-sharing could speed
episode finale were 22 or 23 minutes long. dropped, too, by nearly 70%. up efforts to fight the virus.
Commercial breaks, for their part, shaped Many actors, producers and writers love The case for sharing data predates the
episode cadence: you could expect a mini- these abridged runs because they give pandemic. The oecd, a club mostly of rich
cliffhanger ahead of one. Like hbo and oth- them the flexibility to take other jobs. Cre- countries, reckons that if data were more
er pay-tv channels, most streaming ser- ators also no longer need to worry that widely exchanged, many states could enjoy
vices earn money from subscriptions, not their shows will one day be aired sporadi- gains worth 1-2.5% of gdp. The estimate is
ads, so creators enjoy more artistic licence cally through syndication, so are free to let based on heroic assumptions (such as put-
to determine episode length and structure, plots unspool over multiple episodes. Sit- ting a number on opportunities for start-
says Jonathan Dunn of McKinsey, a consul- com episodes remain mostly self-con- ups). But economists agree that readier ac-
tancy. “Tiger King”, Netflix’s latest hit true- tained but serialised drama is “uniquely cess to data is broadly beneficial, because
crime series, about exotic-cat breeding, suited” for streaming, says Sandra Stern of data are “non-rivalrous”: unlike oil, say,
comes in chunks lasting anywhere be- Lionsgate, a production company. The in- they can be used and re-used without being
tween 40 minutes and 48 minutes. ternet has also enabled “binge-watching”, depleted, to power various artificial-intel-
The medium also determines the struc- which Netflix pioneered with the release of ligence algorithms at once, for example.
ture and number of shows’ seasons. As the the entire first season of “House of Cards”, a Many governments have recognised the
number of American commercial tv sta- political thriller, on February 1st 2013. potential. Cities from Berlin to San Francis-
tions increased from fewer than 600 in 1965 Binge-friendly platforms allow viewers to co have “open data” initiatives. Companies
to 1,600 in 2000, they needed more shows skip the opening and final credits—and en- have been cagier, says Stefaan Verhulst,
to fill schedules. Since new ones are risky courage creators to start with a bigger bang who heads the Governance Lab at New York
bets, broadcasters preferred to stick to ex- and end hanging on a steeper cliff. 7 University, which studies such schemes.
Firms fear losing intellectual property, im-
perilling users’ privacy and hitting techni-
Serial numbers cal obstacles. Standard data formats (eg,
Global, television series*, average, by launch year jpeg images) can be shared easily, but
much that a Facebook’s software collects
would be meaningless to a Microsoft, even
Number of seasons per series Number of episodes per season
4 30 after reformatting. Less than half of the 113
“data collaboratives” identified by the lab
3 involve corporations. Those that do, in-
20 cluding initiatives by bbva, a Spanish

2 bank, and GlaxoSmithKline, a British drug-
maker, have been small or limited in scope.
10
1 Microsoft’s campaign is the most con-
sequential by far. Besides encouraging
non-commercial sharing, the firm is devel-
0 0
oping software, licences and (with the Go-
1955 70 80 90 2000 10 19 1955 70 80 90 2000 10 19
vernance Lab and others) rules frameworks
Source: TheTVDB.com *Based on 34,000 TV series on broadcast television, cable and streaming media; excludes ongoing series
to let firms trade data or provide access 1