In the Arena of the Content War: A Social Network Analysis Approach for Content Differentiation in VOD Platforms

The quest for content differentiation and audience engagement is paramount in the competitive landscape of Video-on-Demand (VOD) platforms. The paper proposes a system investigating VOD platform series data to recommend actors and themes to VOD vendors. To achieve this, we analyzed the storylines of 72 VOD movie series to extract keywords. Using these keywords, we generated a network using Social Network Analysis. By examining the network, we identified content gaps. After semantic clustering, we utilized TOPSIS to determine keywords with high centrality scores. These are a foundation for connecting peripheral keywords and generating new content. The paper’s findings suggest that the proposed content-based recommender system can help VOD platforms create innovative storylines by leveraging structural holes in a TV series content keyword graph. The study also suggests that successful directors take risks by combining different keywords from various network parts. This approach allows them to attract a wider range of audiences and increase their chances of success.