Making trans-regional, cross-platform streaming catalogues a reality: Arguing for linked SVOD open data

Abstract Despite a constant growth as a mainstream way of consuming media, subscription-based video on-demand (SVOD) platforms have remained under-studied in a specific yet core aspect of their service: their contents. Potential quantitative studies have been prevented by the unstable nature of their catalogues, both in time and space, and the lack of will to publish publicly accessible catalogues of these platforms’ works. This hinders many potential Digital Humanities projects pertaining to modern digital media, causing a lack of research by lack of data. After studying available data catalogues and their caveats, we suggest and detail the implementation of a simple model proposal to standardize, archive and eventually publish such metadata, proving that all technical aspects and benefits are already well-defined as well as commonly used, and that this kind of data would be particularly suited for Digital Humanities projects and Semantic Web standards. We thus further argue for more public initiatives to support work on open media catalogues, and push for more data releases from major SVOD platforms that would benefit both scholars and the general public without much burden for their service.