Performance Indicators for Public Service VoD: Visualizing Longitudinal Publishing Patterns

Video-on-demand (VoD) services are increasingly important for public service media (PSM). Yet, the public knows little about the publishing patterns of PSM VoD services. Compared to the transparency in classic program listings for broadcasting printed in newspapers, an overview of availability and findability of VoD content is non-existing. This inhibits any kind of public assessment of the programming of public service media: What are the programming profiles of different PSM VoD services? How do they balance different genres against each other, reflecting the core public service obligation to inform, educate, and entertain? How do they fulfil their public service obligations? Before we can answer such questions, we must develop a method for documenting and analyzing PSM VoD pages. Seeing the patterns of program appearances, movements, disappearances, and reappearances as a dance, we present the “VoD Dance” method to map movements over time of the VoD content. We analyze how PSM VoD front pages change over time at a micro-level (day-by-day) and a macro-level (over several years). We summarize the high-level characteristics of the “dances” in seven tentative indicators.