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Video Streaming Analytics: 101

When was the last time you watched a video on your phone? Chances are, the answer would be anywhere as recent as 1 minute ago to as far-off as a whole day ago. The point is, we’re streaming video footage constantly — and that number is only going up. In fact, according to telecom research company Telecompetitor, digital media consumption on mobile is up 394% over the past four years.

And when you marry the rise of video streaming with the value corporations put on real-time data, you have a valuable opportunity on your hands: one called video streaming analytics. And what is it, exactly? Well, it’s pretty much as it sounds. According to Dataversity, it’s “the ability to constantly calculate statistical analytics while moving within the stream of data,” and must be used “quickly within a small window of opportunity before the data loses its value.”

Companies can then gain visibility into how their viewers are seeing their content: how is the video quality? What’s the bitrate? Were there playback failures? How many exited before the video even started? And if there are failures, which browsers are those on? Which ads are viewers not as excited about? These performance statistics are critical to extract in real-time so the viewers can enjoy as seamless a streaming experience as possible.

And in addition to performance issues, video streaming analytics can also demonstrate which content viewers like and, just as important, when they like them. Preferences and tastes can be extracted this way and the right ads can hit at the right times. Broken down, here’s some of the key data points streaming can offer:

• Management - Meta-data, like tags and available bit-rates
• Monitoring - Quality metrics, like the buffering time on certain devices
• Measurement - Metrics specific to a video, like the amount of time viewed or comments posted
• Monetization - Conversion data, like subscriptions

Live streaming also requires unique metrics, and in addition to the ones for video streaming in general, it also benefits from two additional key data points: the peak viewership and the average number of streams within the video.

Since video streaming analytics is a relatively new concept, there aren’t many experts in the field as of yet — but there are a number of products that help serve this purpose. Even within platforms like YouTube, publishers can see two graphs for every video: hour-by-hour or minute-by-minute, allowing them to gain detailed insights about their streaming performance.

There are other software platforms that do this exclusively — IBM has a platform called Intelligent Video Analytics. Ooyala is a video tech company that works with businesses to alert them on what is trending now, so timely decisions can be made. Brightcove is a video hosting platform with analytic capabilities. And Mux makes video streaming analytics and performance tools itself.

Despite the many options companies can leverage already, given the amount of time we all spend streaming video, the future is still ripe with possibilities for improvement (especially with all of this data to back it). We’ve all seen ads that aren’t relevant to us — like parenting ads shown to non-parents or engagement ring ads shown to someone newly single — and we’ve all had buffering issues from time to time which may lead us to ditch a video altogether.

But over time, and with enough analytics to back it, the viewing experience will continue to improve, and we’ll be streaming even more Netflix than ever.

About Author:

Shahzad Syed is a Marketing Manager at July Rapid, a digital change studio of July Systems Inc. July Rapid team assists startups and enterprises to build engaging iPhone, iPad, Android, IoT and Wearable applications.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Syed Shahazad .