Audience Worldwide provides data and insights on global audiences for the production and distribution of film and television. It serves broadcasters, production companies and streamers competing for international viewers.
Key Services Include:
Audience Data Platform: The company offers a real-time data system that allows clients to see worldwide viewing figures for various content. This is useful for identifying global viewing trends and understanding audience behaviour.
Drill-down insights: Audience Worldwide can provide both high-level global audience information and highly detailed, specific insights. For example, it can analyse viewership for niche content like women’s football.
Export Market Analysis: The service helps companies analyse and identify the best markets for exporting their programming. Audience Worldwide is based in the UK and is active in the production, advertising and business services industry.
Collecting Global Audience Data
Collecting global audience data is extremely complex and expensive, which is why most websites focus on single geographical areas. Compiling a comprehensive worldwide audience picture requires navigating enormous technical, logistical, and legal hurdles.
Data Collection Challenges
The primary reason for limited global coverage is the difficulty of gathering consistent data across different countries and cultures.
Diverse Measurement Methods: Audience measurement firms like Nielsen and Gfk often rely on panels of representative households equipped with “people meters” to measure viewing habits. These panels are designed for national accuracy and differ greatly from country to country, making it difficult to compare the data accurately. There is no single, universally accepted measure for audience size or engagement. Broadcasters, advertisers, and other stakeholders must then choose which company to trust, making market transactions and comparisons more complex.
Viewing Data Quality and Consistency: What constitutes a “view” or “engagement” can vary widely by platform and country. So ensuring data is comparable and consistent across different regions is a major challenge.
Challenges in cross-media measurement and Rapid Technological Shifts:
The industry-wide goal of measuring audience reach and frequency across all media (TV, digital, radio, etc.) is made more challenging when different vendors use incompatible methods for each channel. This creates silos of data that are hard to integrate. Audiences now use an array of devices to watch content, including: smart TVs, laptops, mobile phones, streaming services and social media. Capturing and integrating data from this fractured landscape is a major technological challenge, even for a single market.
Difficulty in Reaching Audiences: For traditional research methods, certain demographics or people in remote areas are often “hard to reach” through standard outreach, which can skew the findings. Collecting reliable information is difficult in many parts of the world due to poor technological infrastructure, limited internet access, or lack of cooperation from the local population.
Cultural and language barriers: What appeals to an audience in one region may not resonate in another due to unique cultural norms, values, and traditions. This requires research to be localised, rather than simply translated, to capture authentic insights.
Regulatory compliance: Companies must adhere to different, often complex, data privacy and security laws in each country, such as Europe’s GDPR, which increases legal risks and costs.
