DISH ‘Viewers to Voters’ Model Predicts Clinton Victory; Republican House Control
November 07 2016 - 8:24AM
Business Wire
- DISH’s Data Science and Media Sales
divisions partner to develop algorithm based on TV viewership and
historical elections data
- Republicans to maintain the House with
an estimated 245 out of 435 seats
DISH today shared the results of its “Viewers to Voters”
predictive model that analyzes the potential outcomes of the 2016
presidential election. Based on anonymized customer viewership data
generated from Internet-connected set-top boxes, DISH’s Viewers to
Voters modeling predicts that Secretary Hillary Clinton will win
the 2016 presidential election.
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DISH "Viewers to Voters" model predicts
Republican House control (Graphic: Business Wire)
Further, the Viewers to Voters model forecasts a Republican
majority victory in the U.S. House of Representatives, with an
estimated 245 out of 435 seats. This data would represent a
two-seat gain for Democrats in the 115th Congress. Sufficient
historical viewership data was not available to meaningfully
predict the state of the Senate.
“With so much focus around national polling, we thought it’d be
interesting to see if we could find a correlation between how our
customers interact with DISH and how they may vote,” said Warren
Schlichting, DISH Executive Vice President of Media Sales,
Marketing and Programming. “We recognize that our call on the
distribution of seats in the House may be an outlier. Yet when we
tested the model against 2014 House elections, we found that we
were able to predict the outcome at a 98 percent reliability
point.”
Developed in partnership by DISH’s Data Science and Media Sales
divisions, Viewers to Voters is the first project completed under
the company’s extra-curricular initiative, “Wisdom of Crowds.”
DISH’s Wisdom of Crowds program will explore the potential
relationships between TV-viewing behaviors and real world
actions.
Viewership observations
Viewers to Voters additionally analyzed the relationship between
programming watched and political affiliation. The model determined
that customers who watched more sports, religious or
family-oriented television were more likely to vote Republican.
Examples include NFL Football, GEB America’s “Giving Hope, Sharing
Life” and PBS’ “Sesame Street.”
In contrast, customers who watched more series/specials,
education or music-oriented television were more likely to vote for
Democrats. Examples include ABC’s “Scandal,” Discovery’s
“MythBusters” and NBC’s “The Voice.”
Methodology
DISH collects anonymized, aggregated viewership data from
millions of set-top boxes across its national footprint. Working
with terabytes of viewership data, DISH’s Data Science team took a
two-step approach to developing a predictive model for the 2016
presidential election.
The first stage of the model identified the relationship between
the shows DISH customers watched in 2014 with the state-by-state
outcomes of the 2014 House elections. A wide assortment of
variables were analyzed including the types and amounts of
programming customers viewed across nine different Nielsen-defined
genres (e.g. sports, movies, education and series/specials). The
second stage of the model then identified the relationship between
House party control and presidential party affiliation dating back
to 1932.
DISH took this approach to accommodate its relatively young
historical viewership data set that dates back only to 2014, when
the last House election occurred. The Data Science team did not
draw from any outside polls to reach its conclusions. The group
expects to enhance its model by introducing hundreds of additional
variables for future projects.
Live election coverage on DISH
DISH has updated several of its innovative viewing features for
Election Day so that customers can optimize their live election
coverage experience:
- Available on Hopper 3, DISH will
convert Sports Bar Mode into the Election Newsroom. This
multi-channel view divides a 4K or HDTV screen into quadrants, each
with the ability to display a different program. When accessed from
the channel guide, Election Newsroom will auto-populate CBS, CNN,
Fox News and MSNBC. Customers may tailor this feature to display
their favorite four news networks and can easily toggle among the
four channels to determine which will play audio.
- With the recent addition of the YouTube
app on Hopper 3, DISH customers can watch live election coverage on
YouTube without changing inputs or devices. Starting at 7 p.m. ET,
YouTube will feature coverage from top news channels including NBC
News, PBS, MTV, Bloomberg, Telemundo and online news network The
Young Turks.
About DISH
DISH Network Corp. (NASDAQ:DISH), through its subsidiaries,
provides approximately 13.593 million pay-TV subscribers, as of
June 30, 2016, with the highest-quality programming and technology
with the most choices at the best value. DISH offers a high
definition line-up with more than 200 national HD channels, the
most international channels and award-winning HD and DVR
technology. DISH Network Corporation is a Fortune 200 company.
Visit www.dish.com.
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version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161107005738/en/
DISH Network Corp.Danielle Johnson,
303-723-2191danielle.johnson@dish.com@DISHNews
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