Gracenote Watch Prompts Offers Platforms Another Way To Convince Viewers To Watch Content

Nielsen’s Gracenote unit said it launched Gracenote Watch Prompts, a new dataset that provides video platforms with interesting facts about TV shows and movies designed to get viewers to watch them.

Gracenote Watch Prompts is designed to be paired with viewers' preference and consumption behavior data to deliver more personalized viewer recommendations and drive increased audience tune-in and time spent viewing.

The prompts highlight positive reviews, popular actors and creators and compare programs and movies to other popular content.

For example, the information page for the HBO series Succession could highlight its 13 Emmy Award wins , including two in the prestigious Outstanding Drama Series category, to inform potential viewers about the show’s critical acclaim and motivate sampling. Or a page on Barbie could describe the offering as Legally Blonde meets The Lego Movie , providing a relatable analogy based on beloved films to pique interest.

“Streaming services are challenged to continually enhance the user experiences they offer to delight viewers, increase time spent and reduce churn,” Trent Wheeler, chief product officer at Gracenote, said. “Watch Prompts leverages the expertise of Gracenote’s human editors along with scalability enabled by machine learning to deliver an entirely new data set that will help our customers evolve and meet these challenges.”

Gracenote Watch Prompts uses a mix of machine learning to create possible pitches based on Gracenote’s library of data on millions of video titles. Human editors review the machine-generated recommendations to ensure their accuracy and quality. The editor’s notes are also fed back into the algorithm, producing better future recommendations.

According to Nielsen’s 2023 U.S. Streaming Content survey, 74% of consumers either don’t know at all or only have a vague idea about what they want to watch when starting a streaming session. Fewer than three in 10 said they feel that recommendations are useful in helping them find compelling content, which Gracenote said means creating more effective and personalized promotions would help platforms engage viewers and improve monetization.