“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina.
In part 1 of this series, we introduced the key role of a powerful streaming intelligence platform to ensure a service operator can meet critical business challenges. But a platform alone does not create the insight and solutions needed to fight the good fight. Part 2 below outlines the baseline tools that leverage rich platform data and help to address business objectives.
A fuller version of the complete three part Streaming Intelligence blog series is available in download form.
Tools to Generate Business Insight
MediaMelon provides a variety of optional tool configurations that leverage the SmartSight Platform data to help operator teams optimize their business profile. These range from baseline analysis utilities to sophisticated delivery bandwidth optimization processes. Key business challenges common to our customer base include:
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Increasing customer engagement: This is one of the most important metrics in streaming video analytics as it impacts all operators who monetize content libraries and events through subscriptions or transactional fees, etc.
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Driving higher revenue: This goal applies to many OTT services, who monetize their content, including live streams, through advertising insertion.
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Reducing churn: Customer acquisition costs are a pressure point for improvement of lifetime customer value. Service stickiness is a major input to this equation.
The most common MediaMelon tool options that build on the SmartSight Platform include SmartSight QoE and SmartSight Ads.
SmartSight QoE is the lens that’s focused on the real consumption experience of your viewers, with continuously visibility of player events for each and every video session. This is the tool that can identify and prioritize trends that will have an impact on your business—both negative and positive.
Become proactive with early identification of negative factors across the whole delivery chain, such as high buffering, CDN issues, errors during playback and start-up failures—with full point of failure analysis.
Enable operations teams with real-time anomaly detection. Reduce resolution time and the impact of issues with accurate root cause identification.
Support your customer care teams with session information that is immediate, granular and event oriented to understand all important contextual information such as network conditions that may be impacting buffering frequency, duration and quality.
Connect operational performance to your business goals with user and device level KPI reporting that helps to prioritize engineering and configuration requirements.
Core functionality includes:
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Real-time alerts for service delivery quality issues and tactics to address root causes.
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Multi-dimensional analysis of consumption patterns across time, geography, device type, network type and genre/channel.
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Understanding engagement levels across your on-demand library or live channel line-up.
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Understanding stream abandonment causes within viewer sessions.
SmartSight Ads is a comprehensive optimization solution for video advertising delivery that can dramatically enhance asset monetization. Ad fill failures and delivery issues often go unnoticed due to the often-complex infrastructure and ecosystem. These issues reduce monetization with fewer ad impressions successfully served and compounds a reduction in viewing experience leading to content abandonment and viewer churn.
SmartSight Ads rapidly identifies and resolves delivery, creative and performance anomalies with actionable intelligence to increase impressions, fill-rates and yields across client-side, server-side and dynamic ad insertion implementations.
SmartSight Ads leverages real-time, granular delivery and performance insights, to enable the rapid resolution of ad ecosystem issues. New ad strategies and opportunities can be identified using the powerful multi-dimensional insights capability.
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Issue resolution for as creative, performance and QoE issues as soon as they occur
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Improvement options for both adding value and enhancing fill rates for advertising opportunities.
The use of a platform approach enables great flexibility in enabling a range of both native and third-party tools to leverage a common dataset—no trusted tool used by an operator team is excluded from access to platform data.
Access to such in-depth data and streaming intelligence reports can help you guide your business. You can use this data to personalize not just content but other offers at just the right time to improve overall ROI.
Don't just take our word for it - take a look at a real world case study example from A+E Networks.
Conclusion
Streaming video data collection and analytics is a core part of OTT services today. Even the most basic tools help OTT businesses diagnose and address systemic delivery issues that impact consumer QoE. But relying on basic historical metrics like total views, average watch time, and others can only provide you with limited insight to service performance and any potential for a competitive advantage. The opportunity here is much greater—to leverage streaming intelligence to build better, scalable business around streaming content.
At MediaMelon, we focus on building powerful streaming intelligence tools that don’t just offer data, but help you gain better visibility into your content engagement and business leverage. We leverage a best-in-class ML-enriched data platforms to derive actionable insights for streaming solutions. From offering real-time data to providing content and subscriber insights, we take care of streaming intelligence end-to-end.
To learn more about MediaMelon, you can reach out to us here.