This article explores how the Dutch streaming service Videoland utilizes viewing data to assist screenwriters and producers in improving scripts to meet the demands of a streaming service. Interviews and observations in 2018–19 and 2024 uncovered practices that differ from the data secrecy associated with global streamers. The article examines how Videoland shares metrics with creatives and how these professionals make sense of the data. Their use of this shared information to validate and refine their “gut feelings” mirrors practices observed in the film industry. Furthermore, the article discusses Videoland’s data-driven feedback as an audience research method familiar from broadcast television and challenges the narrative of the streaming industry as a radical break from traditional television.
Surma et al. (Sat,) studied this question.