After the meeting
Every distribution executive knows the feeling. The meeting went well. The buyer was engaged, the feedback was warm, the slate landed. You left the room confident. Weeks passed. Nothing happened.
This isn’t because buyers are being dishonest. A market meeting is a particular kind of social exchange: relationship maintenance, professional courtesy, a chance to stay connected. What a buyer says across the table reflects all of that. It doesn’t reliably reflect what they will do next.
The real signal comes later, back at their desk, with no obligation to perform enthusiasm. Whether they pressed play on the screener. Whether they came back to the title a fortnight later. Whether a colleague from the same company started looking at it too. That behaviour is the closest thing this industry has to knowing what a buyer is actually thinking.
The first edition of The Next Move showed that this behaviour exists and can be read. This edition goes further. Drawing on behaviour across eighteen distribution environments (a view no single distributor has of its own market), it asks the questions a distributor can’t answer from inside its own four walls:
- 01Is the quiet majority of your buyer list really lost?
- 02Does personalised curation change what buyers do, or only where they start?
- 03How much of your catalogue is anyone actually watching, and what decides which titles get seen?
- 04When a buyer goes silent, are they gone? And can you tell in advance who will come back?
The answers are more specific, and more useful, than the industry’s working assumptions.
Four numbers that change how you read your buyers
Your long tail is full of warm buyers
Concentration is a limit on sales hours, not on demand. The tail isn’t dead. It’s unattended, full of warm leads that surface on their own as signals.
Under 2% of your list does 80% of the watching
Start with the shape of the market. Across the environments analysed, a median of 1.9% of registered buyers accounted for 80% of all screener watch time. The top 1% alone accounted for 62%.
This is not a quirk of any one distributor, and it is not, in itself, a failure. It is what distribution looks like when reaching buyers depends on human bandwidth. A sales team has a finite number of hours, and it spends them, rightly, on the buyers it knows best and the relationships most likely to close. Everyone else gets less. Compounded over years, the result is concentration: a small core who do almost all of the serious evaluating, and a long tail served lightly or not at all.
Buyers ranked by screening. Illustrative curve; head share from the data. 17 environments with watch-time tracking.
Some of that tail is genuinely inactive. Only 11.5% of registered buyers did anything meaningful in the 12 months; the rest of the list is largely history, grown for years without cleaning. But concentration is not evidence that the tail is dead. It is evidence of what a human-paced sales operation can physically reach.
The long tail isn’t ignored because nobody wants those buyers. It’s ignored because, buyer by buyer, serving them by hand was never possible. And that is the point: it never had to be. The tail is not silent. It is full of signals. Buyers who went quiet after watching seriously. A second colleague quietly opening the same title. A first session spent deep on a single programme. These are warm leads, and they surface on their own, in behaviour distributors already record.
The opportunity in the long tail is not more effort. It is reading the signals already there.
Buyers who registered during the window were active at 3.4 times the rate of older accounts: 31.8% vs 9.3%.
of one registration year was ever active. Its profile is consistent with a bulk import. A registry that is mostly history will always make the active buyer look rare.
The quiet majority: mostly history, partly recoverable
92% of registered buyers had no meaningful activity in the last six months of the window. Nearly three-quarters of them have no recorded login and no activity anywhere in the data. Most of the list is genuinely inert. But not all of it.
The dormant buyers still showing signs of life equal more than a third of your entire active buyer base, roughly one more warm buyer for every three actively engaging today.
And some had already watched a screener to the halfway point before they went quiet.
Dormant buyers (no meaningful activity in the final 180 days) still showing a live signal (a recent login, a light touch, or earlier serious activity), expressed as a share of the active base. 18 environments. Proportions only.
These are not cold leads. They are buyers who were recently in your catalogue, evaluating, and nobody followed up. The recoverable share varies enormously: around 30% of the dormant base in smaller, recently built environments, under 1% in the largest legacy registries.
Don’t try to revive the whole registry. Find the dormant buyers still showing a pulse, and start with the ones who had already watched seriously. That is a re-contact list you can build today. Part IV shows how to tell which of them will come back for real.
A warm lead announces itself in the first five minutes
Buyers who went on to take a high-intent action behaved distinctively in their very first session, and the distinction was depth on a single title, not breadth across many. Starting a screener and running a search both independently raised the odds. The number of titles viewed predicted nothing at all.
10+ minutes on a single title page in session one → take a high-intent action later, against 42% for those who glanced and moved on.
Active buyers, 17 environments; leading-indicator figures from buyers whose high-intent action came after the first session. Medians.
Breadth is browsing. Depth is intent. The tell is how a gem in the tail shows itself.
The half you can’t see
59% of all programme page views came from visitors who were not logged in. This is real interest that can’t be linked to any buyer. Every insight here is drawn from the 41% that can. Interest that can’t be attributed can’t be acted on, so the gap is a lever in its own right.
Matching beats sending
Curation changes whether a title gets screened. It doesn’t change how long a buyer stays.
Only 1.8% of buyer title views arrived through a guided route: a link in a sent list or an email. The other 98% came from browsing and search.
The easy story is that lists are under-used and distributors should send more. This edition asks a sharper question: when content reaches a buyer through curation, rather than the buyer having to find it, what actually changes? The answer has two halves, and the second is the more important.
Curated titles get screened more. They don’t get watched longer.
Getting to play
Buyer-titles reaching a deep screening within 30 days
Once it’s playing
Screener starts watched to the halfway point
17 environments. Both panels on a 0 to 30% scale. Guided = arrived via a list or email link, or shared to the buyer in the previous 30 days.
When a buyer’s first contact with a title came through a list or email, they went on to watch at least half its screener 13.9% of the time, against 7.3% when they found it themselves. It holds when the same buyers are compared with themselves (19.2% vs 12.4%), and guided titles came out ahead in 6 of the 10 environments with enough traffic to compare.
Once it plays, there is no difference: 24.9% of screeners started from a list were watched to the halfway point, against 25.5% for self-found screeners. Personalisation gets the right title into the screening queue. It cannot make the content hold a buyer once it starts.
The lift is concentrated in drama: 2.7×
Share of buyer-titles reaching a deep screening. Factual showed a smaller lift: 1.3×.
Curation pays most where the buyer’s commitment is highest and the decision is slowest. A drama needs to reach the right buyer; a quick-turnaround format is judged fast however it arrives.
Treat matching as a measurable discipline. Track screen-through per curated title, not opens per send. The titles a buyer screens from a list tell you whether your matching was right; the depth they reach tells you about the content, not the list.
Search: buyers telling you what they want
Only 1.2% of logged-in searches returned nothing, but an empty search is the most specific demand signal on the platform. Often it is a title you do have but have left restricted, unpublished or mislabelled.
44% of searchers watch a screener seriously, against 28% of non-searchers. Search belongs in lead scoring.
Logged-in keyword searches, 18 environments; 30-minute follow-on measured in 17. No search terms are reported.
Most of your catalogue is unmatched, not unwanted
Most of the library isn’t unwanted. It is overlooked: carried, rather than sold.
If the buyer base is concentrated, the catalogue is more so.
of back-catalogue titles with a screener were not meaningfully screened by a single buyer in 12 months.
of back catalogue unscreened
of back catalogue unscreened
Last two years: share of catalogue → share of screening
Every title sorted by screening volume, left to right. 16 environments. ‘Meaningful screening’ = at least 10% of runtime or 5 minutes watched by an external buyer.
Ninety per cent of those titles were screened by two buyers or fewer. More than one in five weren’t even opened by a logged-in buyer. The range between environments is wide, and that is itself the story. Catalogue size plays a part, but so, the data suggests, does what the distributor does with the catalogue.
What actually decides whether a title gets watched
We compared, title by title, what separates the 32% that get watched from the 68% that are overlooked. The biggest factor is not the content. It is whether anyone put the title in front of a buyer.
Among titles that had never been screened, being listed made a first screening within 90 days 2.9 times more likely (17.1% vs 5.8%). In 69% of cases, the first screening came after the listing. The list isn’t picking titles already popular; it is surfacing titles that were overlooked.
What separates a watched title from an overlooked one
Share of titles meaningfully screened, 16 environments. Adjusted odds ratios: listing 3.2×, video count 2.05× per e-fold, trailer 1.36×, age 0.66× per e-fold. All correlational.
A title nobody screens is usually not one nobody wants. It’s one nobody put in front of the right buyer.
Underneath all of these sits a simpler problem: whether a buyer can find the title at all. Buyers search by name, not by theme (only a fraction of searches use a genre label), so a library title a buyer has never heard of is effectively invisible, however well it would suit them. And genre labels themselves are applied thinly and inconsistently. A title isn’t only overlooked because nobody put it in a list; it can be overlooked because nothing about the way it is catalogued lets the right buyer stumble into it. Richer, behaviour-led metadata, matching on what a title actually is and who engages with similar content rather than on when it was made, is how a hidden tail becomes a discoverable one.
of buyers who meaningfully watched episode one of a series didn’t go on to episode two. In practice, episode one is the screener: tone, premise, cast and production values have to land there.
2 environments; a narrow base, stated plainly.
Quiet buyers come back, and you can tell which
A quiet buyer is usually paused, not lost, and the ones who return seriously can be identified in advance.
One of the most common judgements in distribution is that a buyer who has gone quiet has gone. The data says otherwise.
Of buyers who went silent for 90 days or more, 37% came back within the window, after a typical absence of about four months. And they weren’t returning for a glance: 30% of returns were followed by watching at least half of a screener within a month.
17 to 18 environments. Illustrative timeline; gap shown at median length.
What brings them back is, honestly, not visible in the data: not a send, not a new title, not a colleague. Most returns show no trigger at all; buyers come back on their own, clustering in the spring. So the practical move isn’t to chase the silence. It’s to watch for the return, and to know in advance which returns will matter.
The return that matters is predictable
A buyer who had watched a screener seriously before going quiet was about twice as likely to watch seriously again on their return. That is known before they come back, which makes it a ranking tool.
Share of returning buyers who watched seriously again. Bars on a 0 to 50% scale.
Silence is a phase in the cycle, not the end of it. Rank your dormant list by whether each buyer ever watched seriously. When one of them returns, presses play and lingers on a title rather than skimming, that is the moment, and it is visible the day it happens.
Two people from one company: the committee forms, and it forms early
In companies with more than one active buyer, 11.3% of title engagements drew two or more colleagues to the same title within 30 days. When a colleague was also looking, the same buyers were markedly more likely to act: a 1.5× lift that held in 13 of 16 environments. A third colleague adds nothing; the step change is from one person to two.
Buyers compared with themselves; multi-user companies, 16 environments.
Alert sales the day it happens. The window to support the internal conversation is days, not weeks. Don’t wait for a third.
Fast isn’t the signal. Deliberate is.
Half of all serious screenings happened within an hour of the buyer first opening a title. But buyers who took longer, returning hours, days or weeks later to watch properly, came back to the title again far more often.
Share who came back to the title later. A buyer who screens a week later has, by definition, already returned once; the pattern still undercuts the instinct to prioritise the quickest responders.
Weekend screenings are rare, and more often finished
Only 6% of serious screening happens at weekends, but 53% of weekend screener starts reached halfway, against 46% in weekday office hours.
Eight signals worth acting on
What each signal is telling you, and the move it calls for.
10+ minutes on one title page in the first session
A dormant buyer who once watched seriously presses play again
A title reached a buyer through a list and they pressed play
A curated title went unscreened
A back-catalogue title nobody has screened all year
A buyer searched by name and found nothing
A second colleague from the same company opens a title
A buyer returns to a title and then watches it properly
From reporting to the next move
ONE doesn’t stop at what happened. For every title, it reads the behaviour behind it, names the pattern, ranks the buyers and companies by intent, and recommends what to do next. The markers show where the signals above appear.
The programme drew strong engagement from a small group of identified viewers, with interest concentrated among a few accounts. Buyer A at Company A showed the deepest engagement, watching both parts and returning to Part 1. Buyer B at Company B spent over two hours on the programme page, while most other viewers had much lighter activity. This points to strong interest from specific buyers rather than broad market traction.
Suggested actions
Key people
Key companies
The pattern, named. Concentrated demand: depth from a few buyers, not breadth.
Deliberation. Returning to Part 1 is read as intent, not noise.
Companies, not contacts. When colleagues converge, the company heats up.
The next move. Every insight ends in ranked, specific actions for sales.
See which of your buyers are signalling right now.
Book a Buyer Journey ReviewIllustrative insight; buyers, companies and programme anonymised.
How do you compare?
Figures are medians or pooled rates across the environments where each can be measured.
| Metric | Figure | What to ask yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Meaningfully active buyers (12 months) | 11.5%of registered | How many of our “relationships” actually engage? |
| Concentration of screener watch time | 1.9%of buyers = 80% | Do we know these people by name? |
| Warm dormant buyers | 36%of active base | Is anyone working the dormant buyers still signalling? |
| New vs older registrant activity | 31.8% vs 9.3% | When did we last clean our registry? |
| Serious-buyer first-session tell | 10+ min → 63%later act | Do we flag depth, or just count clicks? |
| Curated screen-through | 13.9% vs 7.3%1.9× | Do we measure curated titles screened, or emails opened? |
| Depth once playing | 24.9% vs 25.5%no gap | Are our screeners strong enough to hold a buyer? |
| Curation lift, drama | 2.7× | Are we curating hardest where commitment is highest? |
| Back-catalogue titles with no screening | 68% | Which titles are unwanted, and which just unmatched? |
| Listing’s effect on an overlooked title | 2.9×more likely screened | Are our best titles actually in front of buyers? |
| Searchers vs non-searchers, serious screening | 44% vs 28% | Is search in our lead scoring? |
| Return after 90+ days of silence | 37% | Do we write off quiet buyers too soon? |
| Committee signal | 29.7% vs 19.8%3-day lead | Can we see when a buyer company is discussing a title? |
| Episode-one-only screenings | 64%stop before ep. 2 | Is our first episode doing the job of a screener? |
| Anonymous share of title page views | 59% | How much buyer interest can’t we attribute? |
Distribution will always depend on relationships, judgement, taste and timing. Nothing here diminishes that. What this adds is a view of the parts of the relationship that happen when nobody is in the room.
That view is more nuanced than the usual story, and more actionable. The quiet majority is mostly history, but the recoverable part can be found and ranked. Curated titles aren’t watched for longer, but they are screened twice as often, and an overlooked title added to a curated list is nearly three times as likely to get its first screening as one left to be found. Most of the catalogue goes unwatched, largely because it is never matched to anyone, not because nobody wants it. The committee that decides a deal forms visibly, and early. And silence, more often than the industry assumes, is a pause.
None of these patterns proves what causes what. All of them are visible, today, in data most distributors already collect but few read.
The ceiling on distribution has never been how many buyers want your content; it has been how many a team can personally understand and serve. That ceiling is the one thing technology can lift, letting the same team read, match and act on the behaviour of the whole buyer base, not just the few it has the hours for.
How this was measured
Data and who counts
Production exports from 18 live distribution environments, 23 June 2025 to 23 June 2026. Demo, test and empty environments excluded. Only external buyers with an identifiable, logged-in account count; distributor staff and anonymous traffic are excluded from every buyer figure. No distributor, buyer or title is named anywhere in this report.
Key definitions
Meaningful activity: a screener play with time watched, 10+ seconds on a title page, a search, a download or a share. Active: at least one meaningful activity in the window. Dormant: none in the final 180 days. Screener vs trailer: videos over five minutes are screeners. Serious (“deep”) screening: at least 50% of runtime, or 20+ minutes where runtime isn’t recorded. Guided route: arrived via a list or email link, or shared to the buyer in the previous 30 days.
Bases and interpretation
Some environments don’t record watch time or video length; each figure is reported on the environments where it can be measured. All findings are observational associations. Where a comparison could reflect who the buyers are rather than what they experienced, a within-buyer comparison (the same people under both conditions) is reported alongside.
