Use Case: Ranking the Top Streaming Services

 Overview

A worked example, end-to-end. We're going to build and read a Demand Report on the world's top streaming services, Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock and Crunchyroll, and use it to answer the kind of questions a streaming strategy team would bring to a Demand Report: who's winning attention overall, where they're winning it, on which channels, and which way the market is moving.

The flow mirrors the one in Creating a Demand Report and Reading your Demand report, use this article as the concrete version you can map back to your own basket. 

The question we're answering

A streaming strategy team wants a macro view of the category for a quarterly planning session. They need:

• A clear ranking of the major streaming services by overall digital demand.
• A read on who's winning where — by channel, and by priority market.
• A directional view — who's trending up, who's flat, who's falling.
• An audience profile — who's paying attention to streaming overall, and how does that shift per entity.

One Demand Report gives them all four, provided the basket and the priorities are set deliberately.

 Step 1: Build the basket

From the Reports List, click New report and pick the Demand Report card. On the Define Report screen, name the report, "Top 9 Streaming Services, Q2" makes it easy to find later and clear in version history.

Add the nine streaming services by typing them one at a time, picking from the suggestions dropdown each time so there's no ambiguity. Before committing to a suggestion, hover the info icon to confirm Demand is tracking the right handles, search terms and URL for that entity.

As entries go in, watch the Entity Status panel on the right. The nine services should all come back green. If anything resolves as Not Found, follow the request flow, for a strategic report like this, it's worth waiting the three working days to have the full basket included. See Understanding entity status and 'Not Found' for the request flow.

 Step 2: Set channel priorities

Streaming is a category where social media is the loudest signal — show drops trend on TikTok, fandoms live on Instagram and YouTube, and X is where the conversation happens in real time. So we push all four social signals toward High on their sliders:

• Instagram Followers, YouTube Subscribers, TikTok Followers, X Followers, pushed toward High.
• Google Search, YouTube Searc, left in the middle.
• Google Growth, URL Traffic, pulled toward Zero.

The ranking the Demand Score produces will reflect that bias: an entity strong on TikTok and Instagram will sit higher than one that's strong only on URL traffic. That's the right shape for a streaming brief.

 Step 3: Set country priorities

Our quarterly planning session is focused on five markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil and India. We add those five in the countries panel, up to 10 allowed, from Demand's near-global country coverage, with Global data included automatically regardless. Argentina, Japan and Mexico don't make the cut this time, but nothing stops us from cloning the report later and swapping in a different set.

If this is the channel weighting you'd use for every streaming-category report, tick Save settings for all new reports so it's already in place next time. Country selection isn't saved as a default, you'll add markets fresh on each report.

Step 4: Choose report periodicity

The planning team wants to revisit this exact basket every quarter, so this is a good candidate for Monthly tracking rather than a one-time report: pick Monthly tracking on the Summary step, and Demand relaunches the report automatically on the 15th of every month, building a history you can browse and compare, no need to manually rebuild it each quarter. (For a single ad-hoc read, One-time report would be the right call instead.)

Step 5: Launch

Glance at the Report Summary panel on the right, nine entities, four channels pushed toward High, five countries added, then click Launch report in the top-right corner. Demand will confirm the build is in progress. The report is usually ready in under five minutes; you can wait on the Reports List or come back via the email notification.

Step 6: Read it, headline-first

Open the report. You land on Summary. The 60-second read gives you the spine of the story; the specialist views let you fill it in.

Summary — the headline

Netflix tops the ranking, predictable. The interesting story is what's happening just behind it: the gap between #2 and #3, and which entities are closest to upsetting the order. The basket-level demographic block tells us the streaming audience here skews male and 25–34, with the United States as the leading market. Those three numbers alone shape the brief.

Channels — who wins where

Switch to Channels. The heatmap immediately separates the all-rounders from the specialists. Netflix lights up across columns, the predictable winner. Disney+ over-indexes on YouTube. Crunchyroll is small overall but owns YouTube Search, which is a precise signal: anime-curious audiences look for it on YouTube, which means YouTube is where Crunchyroll's audience-acquisition story lives. That's the kind of insight you bring back to the activation discussion.

Toggle from scores to absolutes when you want to back the story with raw numbers — subscriber counts, search volumes — and isolate Netflix on the filters panel if you want to pin it to the top for the "us vs. them" comparison.

Countries — where the ranking reshuffles

Now switch to Countries and cycle through the priority markets. In Brazil, HBO Max climbs. In India, Prime Video leads. In Germany, the order is closer to global. Same nine entities, dramatically different country rankings — and that's the country-by-country activation story.

Look also for white space: markets where an entity that should be a leader isn't. That gap between expected and actual country performance is often where the next growth play sits.

Trends — which way the wind is blowing

Switch to Trends. Google and YouTube search trends are available immediately, showing the flow underneath the stock view: Netflix is flat at the top, stable demand. Disney+ trends down slightly, worth watching. Crunchyroll climbs, momentum. Look at the spikes: most align with show drops, launches or news events. Filter to Brazil to see whether the trends shape changes for our top market, and, if so, what that implies for the brief. Follower and subscriber trend charts, on the other hand, are still empty on this first month, with Monthly tracking enabled, they'll start filling in from next month's re-run onwards.

Demographics, Interests, Engagement — colour for the brief

Once the direction is set, the remaining views fill in the colour. Demographics confirms or sharpens the audience skew per entity,  which platform skews youngest, which is most balanced, which is most male. Interests surfaces the adjacent territories the streaming audience lives in, sports and gaming are the expected ones; the unexpected categories are where a creative team can find an angle nobody else is using. Engagement separates reach from quality: an entity with thin engagement is built for awareness; one with strong engagement per post is built for activation and creator partnerships.

Entity Overview — zoom in

Finally, Entity Overview is where you go to deep-dive a single entity or to compare two side by side. Pick Disney+, set the channel to YouTube and the country to Brazil, and you'll get every signal Demand has on that specific scope on a single page. Drop Amazon Prime Video into comparison mode and you'll see how the two stack up like-for-like on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or search. 

 Step 7: Share, clone, re-run

Back on the Reports List, the report's lock icon opens the Share dialog: flip the toggle to Public and Copy report link to send the report to a stakeholder who isn't a Demand user. Clone the report from the actions menu to spin off a variation with a different country selection or a different basket, without rebuilding from scratch. If all you want is to test a different channel weighting on the same nine entities and same countries — tilted toward search instead of social, say, skip cloning altogether: open the Actions menu and click Recalculate cross-channel scores, drag the sliders, and see the new ranking immediately, the change sticks as the report's new configuration.

Because this report has Monthly tracking enabled, there's no manual re-run needed, Demand does it automatically on the 15th of every month. Once at least two months have built up, use Compare months inside Channels or Countries to see the shift directly, or Entity Overview to compare a single entity month over month. The strategy conversation becomes "how is this category shifting?" instead of "how does it stand today?".