Piecing the puzzle of VoD offerings: Audiovisual content in catalogues of eight US and local services in Flanders (2022)

The data was collected in May–June 2022 and consists of 13,500 title entries, corresponding to the catalogue offerings of four US and four local video-on-demand (VoD) services in Flanders, Belgium. The catalogue offerings were retrieved by using Python with the Application Programming Interface (API) of the JustWatch database. The local listings were verified and complemented by data obtained from the companies themselves. Additional information on type of production, genre, format, country of origin and language were obtained from online databases IMDb, the Movie Database and the VOD websites. The authors manually assigned one format to each title, from the following seven categories: film, scripted series, children’s programming (non-scripted), animation film/series, documentary film/series, entertainment (reality-TV, variety, game shows) and other short-form content such as clips and web-series. Scripted content was manually assigned to one of the following five genre categories: comedy/romance, crime/thriller/action/superhero, drama, family/kids, sci-fi/ fantasy/horror. The volume of content in minutes and number of episodes has only been obtained for the local services. 

The data was collected in May–June 2022 and consists of 13,500 title entries, corresponding to the catalogue offerings of four US and four local video-on-demand (VoD) services in Flanders, Belgium. The catalogue offerings were retrieved by using Python with the Application Programming Interface (API) of the JustWatch database. The local listings were verified and complemented by data obtained from the companies themselves. Additional information on type of production, genre, format, country of origin and language were obtained from online databases IMDb, the Movie Database and the VOD websites. The authors manually assigned one format to each title, from the following seven categories: film, scripted series, children’s programming (non-scripted), animation film/series, documentary film/series, entertainment (reality-TV, variety, game shows) and other short-form content such as clips and web-series. Scripted content was manually assigned to one of the following five genre categories: comedy/romance, crime/thriller/action/superhero, drama, family/kids, sci-fi/ fantasy/horror. The volume of content in minutes and number of episodes has only been obtained for the local services.