Exploring VoD Services through Data Donations: A View from Netflix

Researching video-on-demand (VoD) services is notoriously challenging as these platforms maintain tight and strategic control over consumption data. To address this barrier, this chapter explores data donations as an innovative method for accessing real-world viewing data, made possible by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. Under the GDPR, individuals can request their personal data from platforms like Netflix and voluntarily share it for research purposes. Using data donations from 126 respondents, we analyze 51,635 individual interactions with TV shows on Netflix in 2023, structured into 10,519 viewing sessions. We use the dataset to explore three widespread myths in VoD research: binge-watching, popularity, and diversity. Through this exploratory study, we demonstrate the potential of data donations for empirical VoD studies, discuss how to facilitate ethical and secure data donations, and reflect on key challenges, such as low participation rates, messy and incomplete datasets, and issues of sample representativeness.