Measuring streaming availability: the PlatformTrack methodology

Abstract. PlatformTrack is a longitudinal index of streaming-platform catalog presence across 57 countries and 17 platforms. This brief specifies the data sources, sampling design, sync cadence and definitional choices behind the index, and lays out the limitations researchers should weigh when citing PlatformTrack figures in journalism, academic work or industry analysis.

1. Scope of the index

PlatformTrack tracks catalog presence — the binary fact of whether a given streaming platform makes a title available to subscribers in a given country at a given moment — together with the size and composition of that catalog. It does not measure consumption, hours watched, subscriber counts or revenue. The unit of observation is the (platform, country) pair, with one row per pair per weekly sync.

Coverage at the time of writing spans 57 countries, selected for editorial relevance: every G20 market, the GCC bloc, the EU-27 majority, MENA, the Balkans, Nordic Europe and the principal Latin American economies. The country list is reviewed twice a year; markets are added when streaming penetration crosses a threshold of editorial interest, never removed without notice.

The platform list spans 17 services drawn from three categories:

• Global SVOD — Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Max, Paramount+, Crunchyroll, MUBI, YouTube Premium.
• Regional SVOD — BluTV (Turkey), Shahid VIP and STARZPLAY (MENA), NOW (UK), Fubo TV.
• Transactional — Apple iTunes, Google Play (rental and purchase rather than subscription).

The transactional set is included because it provides a useful contrast point: it offers an upper bound on what is “available” in a market once you remove subscription gating, and lets researchers compare the SVOD-versus-store gap by country.

2. Primary data source

All catalog measurements derive from The Movie Database (TMDB), a community-maintained reference catalog with a documented, free, rate-limited API. TMDB’s watch-provider feed is sourced upstream from JustWatch, which maintains the licensing-data agreements with major streaming services that surface their per-region availability metadata.

For each (platform, country) pair, the canonical query is:

GET /3/discover/{movie|tv}
    ?watch_region={ISO-3166-1 alpha-2}
    &with_watch_providers={tmdb_provider_id}
    &sort_by=popularity.desc
    &include_adult=false

The Discover endpoint returns a total_results field that we record as the platform’s catalog count for that country. Subsequent pages of results — typically pages one and two — are used solely to extract a popularity-ranked sample of titles for downstream features such as the exclusivity flag and the trending bands. Totals are not capped at the sample size; they reflect TMDB’s reported total_results regardless of how many pages we read.

We treat the TMDB watch-provider feed as authoritative for the following reasons: the upstream JustWatch dataset is the only public-facing, harmonized, per-region availability source we are aware of; it is updated daily by a dedicated team with licensing agreements in place with each major streamer; and the alternatives — scraping individual platforms or relying on individual press claims — are either operationally infeasible at our scope or unverifiable.

3. Operational definition of availability

A title is considered available in a country if TMDB returns it in the Discover endpoint with the relevant provider filter active for that region. This maps to subscription-tier availability for SVOD platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Max, Prime Video, Apple TV+) and to rental or purchase availability for transactional platforms.

Three definitional choices are worth flagging:

1. Availability ≠ visibility. A title may be in the catalog but not promoted in the platform’s home-screen UI for that region. PlatformTrack counts the underlying catalog, not the curation.
2. Availability ≠ stream-quality parity. A title delivered in 4K HDR in one market and 720p SD in another both register as one availability record. PlatformTrack does not differentiate by stream tier.
3. Availability ≠ language parity. A title with local-language dubs or subtitles in one country, and only the original audio in another, still counts in both. The index reflects what is licensed for distribution, not the localization layer.

These choices are conservative: they keep the index closer to the licensing reality and avoid making editorial judgments about what counts as “real” availability.

4. Sampling design and sync cadence

A full sync runs every Monday at 03:00 UTC. A single run iterates every (platform, country) pair — 17 × 57 = 969 pairs at current coverage — recomputes totals, refreshes the popularity sample, and writes a row to the snapshot table dated to the run date. The snapshot table is the backbone of historical analysis: it preserves the catalog-size series even as the live table is overwritten weekly.

For the popularity sample, we harvest the first two pages of TMDB Discover results per pair, ordered by descending popularity. This typically yields 40 titles per pair (20 per page). The popularity sample feeds three downstream features:

• The top titles shown on each platform-country page.
• The trending bands on the PlatformTrack homepage.
• The exclusivity flag, defined in §5.

Catalog totals are not capped at the sample. A platform with 8,000 Netflix titles in a market will report 8,000 in PlatformTrack, regardless of the 40-title popularity sample.

5. Exclusivity and competitive overlap

Exclusivity is a derived measure. A title is flagged as exclusive in a country when, within the popularity sample for that country, it appears on only one platform. The exclusivity counter at the (platform, country) level is the sum of these flags, recomputed at every sync.

Two consequences follow:

• The exclusivity measure is sample-conditioned. It captures exclusivity among titles that are popular enough to appear in the top-popularity window. A structurally exclusive but obscure catalog item is not counted.
• The measure is country-local. A title exclusive to Disney+ in Germany may not be exclusive to Disney+ in Spain, even if the platforms are the same. This reflects licensing reality.

For research applications that need full-catalog exclusivity rather than sample-based, the underlying TMDB watch-provider feed is queryable on a per-title basis through the StreamWatchHub API.

6. Historical analysis

The snapshot table preserves the catalog-size series at weekly resolution. For any (platform, country) pair you can read back the catalog size at each prior sync, with the columns title_count, movie_count and series_count.

Two analytical patterns are well supported:

1. Time-series at the pair level — e.g., how the Netflix Turkey catalog has grown or shrunk week over week.
2. Cross-sectional comparison at a fixed date — e.g., how Disney+ catalogs compared across Europe in a chosen week.

Two patterns are not well supported by the snapshot table alone: title-level entry/exit timing (which would require sampling the full catalog at each sync, not just the popularity window), and stream-quality regression (which we do not measure at all).

7. Known limitations

Researchers using PlatformTrack data should weight the following caveats:

• Upstream lag. Watch-provider metadata propagates from JustWatch into TMDB on a daily-to-weekly cadence. New launches and content delistings can take several days to surface. A sync run on Monday 03:00 UTC reflects the upstream state as of late Sunday in most cases.
• Provider rebrands and mergers. Streaming services occasionally rebrand, merge or split (e.g., the HBO Max → Max transition in 2023, the Discovery+ catalog consolidation). PlatformTrack uses the current TMDB provider ID; historical comparisons across rebrands require manual provider-ID continuity, which we document in release notes when applicable.
• Sample-based exclusives. The exclusivity flag operates on the popularity sample, not the full catalog (see §5).
• Country coverage. 57 markets are tracked. Markets outside the list are not measured. Notable omissions include China (no major Western platform presence), Russia (post-2022 sanctions complications), and most of Sub-Saharan Africa beyond Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.
• No demand-side data. PlatformTrack measures supply, never demand. Subscriber counts, hours watched, churn, ARPU and other commercial metrics are out of scope.
• TMDB completeness. TMDB’s catalog itself is community-maintained and may miss titles, especially obscure regional content. The absolute level of PlatformTrack’s catalog counts is bounded by TMDB’s coverage, even though comparative analysis (cross-country, cross-platform) is robust to this.

8. Attribution and data reuse

Aggregate figures published on PlatformTrack are free to reuse under CC-BY 4.0, with attribution to PlatformTrack and (where the underlying watch-provider data is being cited rather than the aggregate) to TMDB. A suitable attribution string is:

Source: PlatformTrack (platformtrack.com), based on TMDB Watch Providers data, accessed [date].

Custom slices of the underlying dataset — for example, a 12-month panel for a single region, an exclusivity time-series for a specific platform, or a press-ready chart with PlatformTrack styling — are available on request at [email protected]. For a developer-facing real-time interface to the same underlying watch-provider data, the StreamWatchHub API on RapidAPI exposes per-title lookups and bulk endpoints.

9. Version history

This methodology brief is the current canonical reference. Material changes to data sources, sampling design or definitional choices are versioned in this document. As of the current version, the index covers 17 platforms across 57 countries, sampled weekly from TMDB Discover with watch-region filters.

For citation in academic and journalistic work, the “How to cite” block at the foot of this page provides the canonical reference string.