How to navigate the streaming wars? — Part 2
New year, new you! And to start well, you probably made the resolution to exercise more, eat less junk, sleep more… and watch better content! Unfortunately, only about 8 percent of people making resolutions are successful in achieving them.
No worries, I got you covered:
1/ exercise more: turn any room into a soccer pitch;
2/ eat less junk: snap a picture of any dish and learn how to cook it (coming soon);
3/ sleep more: follow me on Medium or Twitter;
4/ watch better content: snap a picture of a show to get the IMDB rating before you start watching;
Well #4 is nice, but you probably also want to know what streaming service(s) you should subscribe to. What is the point of cutting the cord if it is to get the same over-sized bill every months and a wealth of content that don’t interest you!
Let’s get ready to rumble
Let’s start with the fight that all the press was talking about in 2019 (and will probably keep talking about in 2020): Disney+ vs. Netflix.
Netflix is both a neutral platform and a content maker, meaning that Netflix distributes content made by other companies as well as proprietary. On the other hand, Disney+ only distributes content owned by the Disney group.
It appeared to us (the voices in my head and me) that it was only fair to compare the services based on their proprietary content. We backed this decision based on the observed trend of companies pulling their contents from other streaming platforms in order to launch their own service and develop competitive advantages (it is argued that new customers sign up for services on the premise of exclusive shows — which here will be proxied by proprietary content).
Big Data
Nowadays, you can’t have or do anything without having a salve of data being thrown at your face. Brace yourself.
In this “study”, we have compiled data from three different sources:
1/ An article of TheVerge.com which discloses the lineup of Disney+ at launch;
2/ A Wikipedia page which lists all the original programs distributed by Netflix;
3/ IMDB where we fetched the rating, duration and genre data;
NB: much more data for a more in depth analysis could have been scraped, but we got lazy. Though, the code can be easily augmented.
So, who has the best content?
The “study” examined the ratings of 925 films and shows (291 from Netflix and 634 from Disney). This is a lot of content!! Actually, this is more than 60,637 minutes of content (or about 42 days). To be honest, I thought it would be a little more…
Anyway, who cares about what I think?! What matters is the data. And overall, it appears that Netflix gave the first punch with a slightly better average (7.1 vs. 6.5 for Disney+).
Once again, I have to admit that I was a little surprised. I have a strong affect with many titles from Disney, while I still have yet to find a really great Netflix show or movie. Oh well…
What is the best and worst?
At the time of the “study”, only two shows managed to get the highest rating (9/10): The Mandalorian (Disney+) and When They See Us (Netflix).
On the other hand, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience managed to score a magnificent 1.5/10 (Disney+) — while the worst show from Netflix, Jinn, scored 3.5/10.
What about the best content per genre?
Well, that is a great question, thank you for asking. From the IMDB data, we extracted 24 different categories (action, adventure, animation, biography, comedy, crime etc.). Netflix scored number 1 (meaning yielded a better average) in 21 of the 24 categories. Ouch!
Though, to Disney’s defense, the difference is fairly small in most categories:
- 9 categories (including action, adventure, animation, sci-fi and fantasy) had a difference of less than 0.5 points;
- And in 70% of cases, the difference is under 1 point.
When the rating difference is significant (in terms of magnitude), we can observe that for most of them, they are genres where Disney is historically not present (horror, crime, thriller i.e.).
It is also worth pointing that Disney has a lot more titles and a whole lot more votes on those titles (a median of 7,103 votes per titles for Disney vs 3,036 for Netflix).
Content from Disney is also older. It would be interesting to know when were the votes cast: maybe a time-rolling average would make more sense, incorporating “societal changes” — average after 6 months, 5 years etc.
So, what differentiate them?
So far, we saw that Netflix had a lot less (original) content but had, in most cases, a slight advantage in terms of rating. Great, but it’s not really helpful to make a decision.
Maybe this will. About 43% of Netflix content is under 35 minutes long (16% for Disney+), 58% under 45 minutes (20%) and 78% under 60 minutes (22%). What it means is that if you prefer TV shows (especially TV shows of 45 or 60 min long), you are probably better off with Netflix (228 titles vs. 142 for Disney+ — with very few shows of 45 and 60 min).
On the other hand, if you prefer movies, you are much better off with Disney+ where you can chose from 500 titles (vs. 63 for Netflix).
As we’ve seen, we couldn’t really settle the fight based on ratings alone. Even though Netflix seems to have a slight advantage on this metric, we have to be careful knowing that Disney+ has both a whole lot more titles and much more voters per title.
The good news is that we were able to find a clear cut with the type of content. Netflix is clearly spending its money on shows, while Disney is spending on movies (and shows with a duration of 35 minutes).
You can find the code here and some visualizations here.
PS: You will also find an “app” to help you decide: enter your preference (show or movie, what duration and/or genre) and see what service is best for you.
