Institutional capital is increasingly treating film and television rights as a yield-generating alternative asset class, sitting alongside private equity, infrastructure, private credit and real estate in some of the world's largest fund portfolios.
Blackstone's $1.6bn acquisition of Hipgnosis Songs Fund in 2024. Apollo's $760m equity investment and minority stake in Legendary Entertainment. Shamrock Capital's acquisition of the Vine portfolio of more than 550 films and 2,000 hours of TV. Easttree Media's BlackRock-backed launch in 2025, applying the music catalogue acquisition playbook to film and TV passive profit participations. The pattern is clear: institutional capital is treating film and TV IP as an underwriteable income stream, with deal sizes increasingly reaching the hundreds of millions.
There is one operational problem with this thesis. The data needed to underwrite it is getting harder to access, not easier.
The Streamer Disclosure Blackout Is Widening
Netflix announced in April 2024 that, beginning with its Q1 2025 earnings, it would stop reporting quarterly subscriber numbers and average revenue per member. Disney followed in August 2025, announcing that it would stop reporting paid subscribers and ARPU for Disney+ and Hulu from fiscal Q1 2026. Wall Street has shifted its attention from subscriber growth to profitability, removing the investor pressure that previously forced disclosure.
Title-level viewership is published by streamers only sporadically and selectively. Netflix's six-monthly Engagement Report covers 18,000 titles with a reporting lag. Disney+ and HBO Max disclose almost nothing at the title level. Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video disclose nothing at all.
For an investment committee underwriting a $200m library acquisition, this means the headline distribution channel for catalogue content is a black box. The fund cannot see what is being watched on Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Paramount+ or Peacock at the granularity required to defend a bid. The opacity is structural to the streamer business model and the trend is widening, not narrowing.
What Audience Demand Data Actually Reveals
MUSO Discover Demand measures global audience demand across more than 930,000 film and TV titles in 192 countries, capturing behavioural rather than stated consumption, particularly in the long tail where a significant proportion of catalogue lifetime value often sits, and across territories where streamer disclosure is non-existent.
For catalogue acquirers, this addresses two distinct problems.
The first is value creation on existing catalogues. Once a fund has acquired a library, the question shifts from "what is this worth" to "what is this worth in each territory, and where should we be focusing licensing effort." MUSO's title-level country-level data identifies where audience demand is strongest relative to current distribution coverage, surfacing untapped licensing opportunities that historical revenue patterns alone do not reveal. A library that appears mature in its established markets may show significant latent demand in Brazil, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia where licensing has historically been thin.
The second is defensible IC valuation. When a fund is bidding on a target catalogue, the seller's data room contains historical revenue figures and forward projections that reflect past distribution conditions. They do not reflect what audiences are actually consuming today, where demand is building in markets that may never have had official access, or how external triggers such as franchise releases, talent resurgence or genre cycles can reactivate titles that financial models have written down to near zero. A third-party demand signal, independent of the seller's data, is increasingly what separates winning bids from overpaying ones.
The Comparable-Title Demand Curve
For institutional acquirers in particular, the most operationally useful application of MUSO data is the comparable-title demand curve.
When underwriting forward cashflows on a target catalogue over a 5 to 10 year window, the question is rarely "what is the demand for this specific title today." It is "what does the demand curve look like for the closest 20 to 50 comparable titles, in which territories, with what decay characteristics over time." MUSO's seven years of behavioural history across 930,000 titles makes this analysis possible at a granularity that few other datasets support.
For a fund investing in a 1990s back catalogue, modelled decay assumptions matter more than current-year revenue. For a fund investing in a franchise library, the cross-title halo effect of new releases matters more than per-title performance. For a fund investing in regionally focused content, territory-level audience strength matters more than aggregate global demand. In each case, the comparable-title demand curve is the analytical primitive that makes the underwriting defensible to LPs.
A More Complete View of Catalogue Worth
The shift toward data-informed catalogue acquisition is already underway. Catalogue funds, royalty platforms and the advisory firms valuing their deals are increasingly incorporating audience demand intelligence into both their acquisition diligence and their post-acquisition portfolio monitoring. The streamer blackout means the data inputs that mattered five years ago no longer exist. The data inputs that have replaced them are behavioural, global, and independent of platform availability.
For institutional capital deploying into film and TV catalogues, the opportunity is to move beyond models that depend on incomplete platform-reported viewership and instead build investment theses on observable global audience behaviour.
How Catalogue Acquirers Are Using MUSO Data Today
Catalogue funds, royalty platforms and their advisory teams are already using MUSO Discover Demand to support institutional acquisition decisions and ongoing portfolio management. In practice, this includes:
- Pre-acquisition diligence: running comparable-title demand analysis across a target catalogue to identify which titles carry active global demand, which territories show untapped licensing potential, and where the demand picture suggests upside that historical revenue alone does not reflect.
- IC memo evidence: providing third-party, behavioural demand signal that holds up under LP scrutiny on libraries the streamers no longer publish title-level data on.
- Portfolio monitoring and value creation: tracking how acquired libraries are performing across territories and identifying licensing-out opportunities, decay-curve outliers and genre or franchise triggers that warrant strategic action.
If you are evaluating a catalogue acquisition, building an investment thesis around content assets, or running ongoing portfolio analysis on libraries already acquired, MUSO can provide a demand analysis tailored to the specific titles and territories in play.
Get in touch to discuss how audience demand intelligence can strengthen your next catalogue investment decision.
