How Is Online Video Like Game of Thrones? |

The online video space is competitive, and sometimes even fractious, so it’s no surprise that we often talk about it in martial terms. “The MCN wars” and the “mobile video arms race” are familiar terms for industry press but Mode Media has taken it one step further by visualizing the whole online video landscape as a literal map complete with its own continents and distinct nations.

The map is built from comScore data which it uses to track each video platforms reach within the US giving the industry a new way to think about the space. The size of each “nation” represents that size of a platform’s total reach and the “lands” under that nation’s control represent that core strengths and subsidiary platforms that depend on it.

As one might expect owned video platforms are the most populous nation with a diverse array of lands including YouTube, Vevo, user generated video hubs, and various MCN’s under its sway. However looking to the west it’s easy to see that social networking sites, dominated largely but not exclusively by Facebook, are rapidly expanding their territory. To the south longform streaming services and cable adjacent OTT video have a strong and growing stronghold. It might be reading too much into the map to say that this territory is drifting perilously close to conflict with the land of platforms but then again, maybe it’s not.

The map doesn’t account for all the finer points. For instance, the land of aggregator sand MCNs has been exporting its content around the globe in recent years. Much of what this region produces now finds a home on owned content sites, streaming TV platforms, or social networks rather than being bound by a strict border. The map makes for an interesting way to visualize the current state of the industry but some enterprising animator might want to add a bit of continental drift as convergence grows ever closer.