We live and breathe TV metadata as few people do. Metadata actually confronts you indirectly every day, as it drives navigation in streaming services and on TV platforms.
With Corona kicking in, our own children increased the time spent in front of the television. So we started to observe and analyze how our children were deciding on, picking, and consuming content from Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, as well some national and regional streaming services such as the Danish DR Ramasjang and Viaplay:
How did they navigate?
Where and when did they spend the most time browsing around without finding the content they wanted to watch? And why?
When they made quick viewing decisions - what was the key driver for their decisions?
Content targeted children are driving billions of dollars and many families subscribe to streaming services in relation to their children's content loved shows and characters. So it was interesting to dive deeper into the behavioral differences between navigation of leading streaming services and the experiences our children had when using traditional TV operator platforms - we had the pleasure of testing several of our own customers' interfaces.
We learned three things:
Our children had no meaningful content carousels for similar kids' content from traditional TV operators. Most kids' content was just filled into one big kids' category and then they could start searching.
Age segmentation is a must to increase content relevance. And our older kids had different selection criteria such as kind of images and relevance of additional information about the programs than our pre-school children.
Our children love to navigate based on character profiles such as Peppa Pig, Vampirina, Barbie, and Bob the Builder. Nearly no traditional TV operator had this navigation - even they had tons of good content across linear channels and in-bound streaming services.
Our conclusion was clear: We need to enable and support TV operators in their aspirations to build interfaces in the same way as the big streaming platforms do it. The platforms should be able to differentiate and nuance the navigation in their kids' content section.
So what have we done? We have created the most comprehensive keyword space that will enable advanced navigation by divided the content into moods, settings, characteristics, audiences, and periods. And this is done for all local, regional, national and international content. And then we learned a lot about the importance of educational content that we are brought up in one of the next articles.
Thanks to the team around Simply.TV for contributing to this article and the gained insights - especially thanks for our research expert Ioana Iftode. For more regular insights, follow Simply.TV on LinkedIn.