What are Genres?

An introduction to Genres in DEMAND360 Enterprise

Product Education avatar
Written by Product Education
Updated over a week ago

Genres are a simple yet complex piece of metadata for both TV shows and movies.

Complex because there is no industry authority that maintains a coherent and agreed upon genre catalog, let alone the consistent application of genres.

This means we are left with the inconsistent application generated by all facets of the industry - i.e. creators, producers, distributors, etc.

There are also differences in how to express genres - such as having main genres with sub-genres or the use of genres as a flat but overlapping schema.

Both flat and hierarchical genre taxonomies are used throughout the industry.

DEMAND360 has a flat genre system in which titles are tagged with multiple genres as this allows for more flexible analysis and has less limitations compared to a main-genre / sub-genre hierarchy.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Parrot Analytics determine the list of genres? Why is this an industry-leading taxonomy?

Parrot Analytics collects metadata - like genres - from various data sources. Each data source has its own selection biases, so we create a single source of truth.

We are continuously refining our taxonomy to ensure that it is the most robust and advanced content taxonomy in the industry. We ensure accuracy by seeking consensus between data sources as well as input from our team of industry experts and producer, TV network, studio and streaming clients around the world.

How does Parrot Analytics determine what genre/s a title belongs to?

Parrot Analytics collects genre tags for each title from multiple data sources.

We then map each genre tag to our refined list of genres. Our algorithm selects and ranks the genre tags in order of importance, considering factors such as the frequency across sources and exclusions of contradicting genre tags, e.g. news and documentary.

The majority of titles (90%) have a maximum of 4 genre tags.

What if my analysis requires a different taxonomy?

You can use Custom Portfolios to easily create a static or dynamic list of titles. When creating the portfolio you can use any gene filter - e.g. genre and keyword filters - to manually select titles to curate your custom genre list.

What has changed with the new genre tagging system (Dec 11, 2023)?

We have rolled out a new and improved genre tagging system across DEMAND360 to make your genre analysis more targeted and accurate.

We have made the following improvements to the taxonomy:

  • More nuanced genre analysis. 78 genres have been turned into 27 genres and 52 keywords. The keywords are a mix of themes, moods and formats. You will notice this change in the genre filters across DEMAND360 as well as genre analysis pages, e.g. Demand vs Supply and Demand Share.

  • Accurate and meaningful title level-analysis. Each title now has a reduced number of genre tags. Assigning a more concise list of genre tags to a title means that the labelling is more meaningful and less likely to contain contradicting genre tags.

  • Same flexibility. You can still use all previous genre tags in your analysis by using both genres and keywords to build a custom portfolio of manually curated titles. For example, if you have previously queried all animation titles that are not anime, you can still achieve this selection with a combination of genre and keyword filters.

How do genres and keywords apply across TV shows and movies?

27 genres and 52 keywords are currently available for TV shows.

A subset of 20 genres is available for movies. Keywords are currently not available for movies.

Genres available for TV shows:

Keywords available for TV shows:

Genres available for movies:

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