With a portfolio of brands, NBCUniversal has a need to understand the performance of each business in relationship to each other. Within its Entertainment vertical, full-episode video viewing on its ad supported digital platforms is most crucial to the business.

Below is a bar chart, ranked in descending order of video views across all digital platforms by brand. Here we can see that NBC Broadcast, as expected has by far the most video views of NBCU’s digital entertainment brand. However, among the cable properties Bravo is the strongest network. We can also see from this chart, the impact of the Hispanic market, which has pushed Telemundo into the third most viewed network within the NBCU portfolio - placing ahead of general market brands such as the USA Network, Syfy & Oxygen. Although NBCU’s news brands CNBC & MSNBC are listed here, they are not expected to perform in this catergory because of most of their viewing is driven by live events and short-form news clips.

Given that many of the brands share the same product stack (CMS, Video Player, Mobile Applications), in as much as it is important to understand performance by brand; it’s also important to understand performance by platform because that’s how investments are made. It’s clear from the bar chart below that we are in midst of another transformative phase in Digital usage, especially for the consumption of video content. The bar chart below shows, that inspite of the smaller screen people are conusming more full-episodic video on their mobile devices with an app (although still in teh home), than on PC/Laptops. However, we can also see a substantial share of traffic going to connected-devices (AppleTV, Roku, Xbox One, Chromecast, etc.). The question becomes, what will be the device/platform of the future and where should content providers invest most of their time and resources. For example, Q12016 was the first time that Apple reported quarterly losses, driven by a 16% decrease in the number of iPhones that were sold (which represent two-thirds of its revenue). Are Apple’s lossed the by-product of competition from other mobile phone operating systems, or a shift to other devices?

Finally, a look at programming is key determining strategy for any content provider. After all, it is the programming that provides the incentive for the consumer to visit content providers websites and applications. In this case, consistent with our first chart, nine out of the top ten programs are driven by NBC Broadcast, with number ten belonging to Bravo (the number two network).

In part II of our project, we will exam text found in our Twitter API search for the number program “The Blacklist”, and determine if we can glean any insights from it.

Function Reference Section:

fill argument to help read.table execute
Source: Stack Overflow Posting on Error in Reading in Data Set

iconv function to handle bad characters
Source: Stack Overflow Posting on Invalin Multibyte String

full join using base merge
Source: R-Bloggers

addtional cleaning of NA Source: Stack Overflow