How Streaming TV Keeps Track of What Content is Where with David Sanderson, CEO of Reelgood

From DVDs To Fragmented Streaming

Tim Rowe 0:00

Binging your favorite series used to be pretty simple. Pop in a DVD from the box set of season three of The Sopranos, sit back and enjoy it. That is, after you waited for it to come out on box set, after you waited for it to get onto television just to enjoy it at your leisure, all of that, consuming the content we love, when we want it, how we want it. That was supposed to be solved by streaming. But now, search for your favorite show or your favorite franchise, and you can be left switching from app to app or unable to find it all together. For studios, for streaming services, for consumer tech who want to run the best businesses, it requires high fidelity data that gives you insights, like which studio has a gap in their portfolio, or how is our portfolio unique if we put a little strategic positioning behind it? Or simply, how do you make the modern consumer journey of finding a show, movie, or a piece of programming simple? That's what today's conversation is all about, because we're catching up with real good CEO David Sanderson. RealGood is the company powering most of the streaming TV catalog experience, simplifying an equally fragmented universe of content to create predictable user journeys, and for creating unique competitive advantages in an otherwise pretty noisy and crowded space. Welcome back to this Dave Streaming podcast where we help buyers and sellers stay ahead of the headlines in streaming TV. So if this is a conversation, this is the topic that you're interested in learning more about, sit back, relax, and enjoy. David Sanderson, Real Good, very excited to have today's conversation, maybe high level, get us started. What's the problem that RealGood solves and who do you solve it for?

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me. Uh RealGood, we started as a consumer uh stringing guide. We quickly found that the data that we needed, basically where content is available globally, didn't really exist. So that's funnily enough, we kind of fell into a data business where we now power basically where is content any content available on streaming services, both globally as well as historically.

Building A Global Availability Data System

Tim Rowe 2:13

All right. Well, that's a simple synopsis of what would seem to be a pretty hard problem to solve. How do you approach skid in that cat? There's a lot of content, there's a lot of original content, licensed content, global distribution. Like, where do you start?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Yeah, uh, I mean, I vastly underestimated the problem when I first was building our streaming guide. Like we licensed from existing data vendors and found the quality of data to be very poor. It just like we were presenting wrong data to our customers. Like this title, yeah, like with this title, we would say this title is on Netflix, but it left two months ago. Or a massive max title that like I remember once I was in my office and there was a billboard, I think it was for Wolverine or one, there was a big title that was like a big title for Max. And our the data we were getting from our data provider didn't say it was on Max enough. This is a problem. So what we spent probably about eight years and tens of millions of dollars building was a machine learning system to kind of map together all of the catalogs of all the streaming services. The reason that's necessary, as I've learned kind of the hard way, is there's no industry standard ID. So Netflix and Disney and Prime might all have the same movie, but they will have a completely different ID for it, their own internal ID. So like you can't just map it based on basically like the same barcode. So what we've had to do is build a system that can operate independently of a universal ID and look at like the cast and the crew and the runtime and the synopsis. And you would think those would be the same. They're very frequently not. A lot of times streaming services will list a different release year for the same title. So basically, had to build a system that couldn't do what that traditionally is being done by thousands of people manually entering data, built a machine learning system that could serve at the same level of intelligence, it can intelligently make those maps and do it in real time, do it with a high-level accuracy, not creating duplicates. It's you're right, it's a big, it's a big messy problem.

Tim Rowe 4:03

It's interesting too. I'm thinking about a previous conversation we had with Shelly Stansfield from Centriply, where they are in the business of standardizing all of the available ad inventory from all of the local cable markets. So what's kind of rattling around in my head is this isn't just a fragmentation of streaming platforms. This is like a syntax. This is this is how we talk about the things, the ad spots, the content that's running against those ad spots. There's really no standardization at all.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Exactly. Like that's that's kind of the fundamental problem is there is no industry standard ID for like interstellar. It's not like everyone's agreed. This is the ID, we can all agree that this is interstellar. Everyone's gone and made their own entry for it. And hence, like if there was a universal ID, we wouldn't need the machine learning, we wouldn't exist as a data business, like none of this would exist. But what I've typically seen in the industry is a lot of well-intentioned groups and people try to come out and say, this is the new industry standard ID. But what actually ends up happening is they just make the problem worse. Now there's another ID in the space, and some people are mapping to and others aren't.

Tim Rowe 5:12

All right. So let's talk about some of the customers that you work with and some of their use cases. What are what are some of the most common challenges that your partners are trying to solve? Talk to us about some of that.

Who Uses The Data And Why

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Yeah, I mean, again, it goes back to just accurate data and having it be timely, especially with when you're presenting streaming availability, it needs to be accurate because if it's a week old and that title's not in that service, you're presenting effectively wrong information to your users. So our customers can break into effectively two use cases. So one is consumer tech companies. So you can think, you know, that the top tech companies in the world, the big search engines, some of the top AI companies, where like if you're searching or you have an AI query or you're on one of their TV or set-top boxes and you're looking at a title and want to see where it's available. A lot of the industry runs off of our data for that, where basically accuracy is very important. And then the other side, and that we've admittedly kind of fallen into, is I would say, like the studios and the streaming services, which is it's the same data set, completely different use case. What they use our data for is, and that's like the likes of like, you know, the Warner Brothers and the Studios and streamers, is they one want to understand what the competitive landscape looks like. So a lot of them like they know what's on their streaming service, but they don't have a sense of what their competitors are up to. So because our data maps everything together and all the genres and tags are mapped together, you can see, oh, my competitor is seems to be like selling off all of their comedy content and their catalog of dramas has doubled over the past year. You can get a sense of the strategy so that you can kind of decide what is our high-level strategy as a streaming service or a studio if you're producing content. And then the second that's been very interesting to me is licensing the decisions. And especially sometimes, you know, these are hundreds of millions of dollars being decided or um what content to produce. What they look at our data for is the historical streaming availability. So they'll see for this title where has that been available before. So, like if you're a Netflix and the title's been on one of the other major services for the past three years, that might not be so interesting. But if it's only being available on like T Vod to date, and you can be the first of sort of the big streamers to bring it to market, that's very important information to know and can have huge impact. So I would say the historical data is really what's used by the studios and the streamers for like strategy and licensing. And then for the consumer tech companies, they care more about like, I want the accurate information as of the second.

Tim Rowe 7:32

That's very interesting. And the accurate information, right? That I'm just thinking back to the good old days of hey, let's go see a movie this weekend and flip into that page in the newspaper and see it. All right, what time is the movie? And you went there knowing that that's the time that the movie's playing, or you opened a TV guide and you flip to channel 37 at 9:30 and that show is on. Yeah, this is obviously a great problem to to solve for consumers. I'd love to double-click though into what you what you called out there the most interesting part right now, the insights, the insights that studios and streaming services are getting. You kind of touched on it there, but what are you seeing? What what sort of insights are most interesting? How are they making decisions with those insights?

Strategy, Licensing, And Marketing Insights

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Yeah, I would say I everything sort of goes like almost top the bottom. Okay. So at the very top executives, like I said, they're thinking like company streaming service studio strategy. Like what type of content are we green lighting, are we or licensing? So at the highest level, I would say sort of relatedly and similar bucket, interestingly, is the marketing teams. I'm surprised how many of the streaming services actually don't really know, well, again, how their catalog compares to their competitors, but the marketing team will be like, oh, okay, we have the biggest horror catalog compared to everyone else. We should lean into that. That's what our whole marketing campaign this year should be about. Again, these things that because we're close to the data, we're like, yeah, it's very obvious. But then to these people, you forget they just simply don't have this data. And then I would say, like I mentioned before, licensing decisions, that's a huge one. Where has this title been before? Like, and it everything from Avods, S VODs, um, like with Avods, you know, they also like to be the first to bring it. Like if it's been on Tubi for the past two years, and kind of the people that like free content may have already seen it, then another Avod may not want to license that title because they're kind of like, yeah, it's probably not going to bring something new to like that group of users. But if they see, oh, it's only been on SVOD, we could be the first AVOD to bring it to market. That's that can be really big. Uh that's really interesting. So that type of data. And then it goes all the way down to uh rates management, and that kind of goes into two buckets. I would say one is I've seen it's interesting, like some you know, studio/slash streaming services where they don't necessarily know where their whole catalog is actually available to stream. So like they'll see, oh, I've been on calls with like massive studios and networks, and they're like, Oh, we didn't realize that we're licensing that title to that service. We have our own streaming service. We should stop that. We should be licensing that for our service. What are we doing? No kidding.

Tim Rowe 9:59

Yeah. So visibility into like their own portfolio and their like their business, but before you even go out and worry about what's going on outside, yeah, you're getting better insights and visibility into our business, into their own catalog sometimes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Which is fascinating to me. And then lastly, is even just like rights management. You know, one studio they they spun off a piece of it, making sure that all of their titles are no longer showing on that other streaming service. So it's like just even tracking to make sure. And like none of the stuff is, I think, nefarious. Again, it's just a giant, massive, messy problem. Someone forgot to turn off that movie on that service when that split happened or that license ended.

Tim Rowe 10:35

Right? Like, all right, let's just keep using classic metaphors. That's that's someone not returning a video, not getting it back on the shelf, right? It's not, it hasn't been moved around to the other store where we've got to move those titles. It's right, it's at the end of the day, it's inventory. Right, it's logistics. We're just moving things from point A to point B. So having visibility like real good offers is is obviously critical to do that. So there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of uh a lot going on in the marketplace right now around Netflix, Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery. Everyone's got an opinion and for different reasons, but your team did some interesting research that you recently released. What did that research find?

Rights Management And Catalog Visibility

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Yeah, anytime there's a news story, I always love to just dig into our data. There's always some sort of gem that will usually come out. So, what I found with this, I would say at a very high level, is basically that like Paramount needs Warner Brothers more than Netflix. That's kind of the high level of it. Okay. So when we looked at the top 10 titles on Paramount, 40% of them are licensed from Warner Brothers. When you compare that to Netflix, none of the top 10 are licensed by Warner Brothers. For Paramount, when you zoom out to even the top 50, a quarter of their titles are licensed from Warner Brothers. So you can to me that just really shows like there's a lot more exposure in that sort of high quality top-performing content for Paramount that comes from Warner Brothers. So again, kind of at a high level, what I see like for Netflix, buying Warner Brothers is really an offensive move. For Paramount, it's a defensive move. So like for Netflix, if they decide to keep all of the Warner Brothers titles for their own service, which you know kind of would be a smart strategic move, Paramount loses access to all of those premium titles, which and premium titles are a very important part of driving subscribers. And what that does too, the other piece is like we look back at titles released last year by CAG. And both for movies and shows, adaptations were the number one like sub-genre of content released. So what that told me is that, and it's no surprise where ROI is being a lot more judged these days, a lot more scrutiny around that. It's a safer bet. If you can make a show or a movie that already has an existing fan base, a proven story that's well liked, that's just simply a safer bet. Warner Brothers obviously has a massive amount of IP, you know, the whole DC universe, Batman, Superman, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, like these are things that are relatively sure bets. And then they can take that IP and make, as you're seeing Max do right now, make all these spin-offs of Game of Thrones, with like you know, it's going to have kind of a built-in audience. Netflix all of a sudden gets to keep all of that IP to itself and make all these spin-offs when, like I said, adaptations are like the name of the game right now. So like it makes a ton of sense to me that they're going so hard after this.

Tim Rowe 13:29

Oof. This just got even better. I feel like that's I don't hear that on CNBC. I don't hear Jim Kramer going deep like that. That that is awesome insight, David. Thank you for sharing that. We're gonna look at, I think, a few examples here. We uh we we scoped out a few examples to to look at some popular franchises that that we wanted to take a look at. Is it okay if we look at some real good data and some examples?

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Yeah, absolutely. These are always a great way to show the craziness of the of the industry.

Tim Rowe 13:59

All right, cool. So we gave you three titles, three very popular franchises that have different adaptations and all sorts of spin-offs and lots of long tail content. The first one was Yellowstone.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Yeah, so this is a relatively simple one, but again, if like sometimes we like to look at the universe, right? Not just the show, but like the universe, and obviously the Yellowstone universe, there's the main title, and then there's the two spin-offs. So, and you would I think you would kind of think, okay, well, I can watch, you know, Disney, you can watch all the Marvel movies. But with Yellowstone, the main show is on Peacock, but if you want to watch the spin-offs, you have to go to both of them are only available on Paramount Plus. So, again, to watch the whole thing, two different streaming services for the same universe.

Tim Rowe 14:42

Okay, that one's pretty easy.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

The next one is pretty straightforward.

Tim Rowe 14:46

That one's pretty straightforward. Okay, all right, but but still as a consumer, like still didn't I need two different apps to watch the right the thing I want.

Paramount, Warner, Netflix Exposure Analysis

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Yeah. I mean, the classic example that I usually reference is when The Walking Dead was still airing, that was hilarious. Like it was like the most recent season would be on AMC, another few seasons would be on one service, a few seasons before that on another service. So, like, I think at some point, if you wanted to watch The Walking Dead, just the single series from beginning to end, I think you needed like four or five different street services.

Tim Rowe 15:15

And that's just The Walking Dead. That's none of Walking Offs. Yeah, it's crazy. All right, how about James Bond?

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Yeah, so I actually it was so crazy when I looked at the universe of it that I had to thin it down to just one title because that alone had enough crazy. So I took, I just literally the first title I narrowed it down to was Skyfall. And here's what I found. So over the past about four years, it's been on Hulu for a year, it was on Prime for a few months, it was on Netflix for one year, uh, it was on Max for six months, it's gone on and off of Prime six times during that period for like several month stance, and I just stopped there because like I could keep going. The list just kept going.

Tim Rowe 15:55

Right. How do you navigate that? That's crazy. Okay, and the last one, this is this is a childhood favorite for me, and there's been lots of versions since Jurassic Park.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

How about the Jurassic Park? So similarly, I had to just pick one okay so that it would be nice. So I did Fallen Kingdom, so it was on Apple TV for one month, Max for two months, Hulu for three months. Uh, it's done a few six-month stints on Peacock, then it was on Prime for two months, and similarly, like just keeps going.

Tim Rowe 16:24

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Okay.

Tim Rowe 16:26

So obviously, you're seeing all of this behind the scenes. What do you think is happening? What are any big predictions for 2026 and beyond? What are you thinking about?

SPEAKER_00 16:36

I mean, we're just seeing a lot more stuff happening in-house. I think less licensing, more either bought, like the Warner Brothers thing we talked about, or in-house and people sort of keeping their content to themselves or for their own service, and like less, I think, licensing to each other.

Franchise Case Studies: Chaos In Practice

Tim Rowe 16:52

Very good. And as advertisers, hopefully that simplifies it. But then obviously the the MA activity and the consolidation that that makes it hard again. So if folks want to learn more, you have a great data-rich blog site. How do folks learn more about real good, the research that you do, and potentially partnering?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yeah, so I would say we have data.realgood.com. That's our B2B site. So you can always go there. I would say follow me on LinkedIn or a company. We try to we take little nuggets uh that we find in our data and put out a lot of uh reports there.

Tim Rowe 17:25

You do put out a lot of reports. There was a post that you put out. Oh, it's this one. Nearly half of all movies and TVs, shows in our database are not available to stream in the United States. Can we can we talk about that for a second? That that that seems like a more important point than maybe is being talked about.

Predictions: Less Licensing, More Control

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah, I was frankly surprised at that too. That was one where I even went back to our data analyst team and I was like, let's let's double check this. But yeah, there's just, I mean, especially when you look, I think we did something where it was the top eight streaming services in the US. It the numbers are actually even more shocking. I think it was about 13% of all shows and movies are available on like the top eight big streaming services. So, but yeah, I mean, this this includes obviously just available in the US on any service, but yeah, it's a relatively small band. There's a lot of international content. And I think that that's a very there's no surprise with the likes of Squid Games, but I and and titles like that. But that's where I think if studios and streaming services are focused on ROI and impact, they need to be a understanding the data and seeing what the international stuff is and looking at, you know, what things that are popular, but just focusing more of their licensing decisions on that for a few reasons. One is especially if you can get existing IP, like I think heated rivalry is obviously a very hot show right now, is kind of a perfect example of the direction I think companies need to and some are going towards, which is it was based on a book, so existing IP, already proven, massive rabid fan base, so relatively safe bet. Made in Canada. I think what I remember seeing is about three million dollars. So like that's a very potent combo of like proven IP, international title. That's where I think kind of like the gold lies, or like the margins for these services. Because like I remember heated rivalry, I think it just dropped out of our top 10, but it was in our top 10 for many weeks since it came out. And I remember seeing it was right up against Stranger Things, and the budget for Stranger Things was literally, as far as I know, it was like somewhere in the magnitude of like 100x of what Hero Drive on. So I think that's kind of the big thing is focusing on existing IP and international markets to sort of find your outsized returns.

How To Learn More And Closing CTA

Tim Rowe 19:37

That's good. David Sanderson, we're gonna have to do this again. I feel like there's a lot here. It's gonna be evolving and uh continuing to change as we move along throughout the year. We'll link to all of those to your site, tons of great research there. We'll link to your socials where you're sharing a lot of that research and surfacing it on a daily basis. We'll link to all those things so they're they're close by and easy to find. David, thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with a colleague or a client. Start a conversation today. And we'll see you all next time.