10 Essential Elements to Creating a Great Video Streaming App
“A lot of media brands are looking at the proposition of standing up an OTT service as a profit center and not a cost center,” Smith says.
6. Live Linear and DRM
As OTT becomes more popular for both live linear and on-demand content, fewer content owners are willing to take the risk of having their streams hijacked or their authentication bypassed.
“We’re seeing more content owners requesting full DRM in addition to just simple stream encryption or token authentication,” Zambelli says. App developers should think carefully about the operating systems and devices they intend to target, since DRM support varies greatly between platforms.
Even in a common encryption DRM solution, such as the one used in conjunction with MPEG-DASH, the app developer must still confirm that at least one of the DRM technologies included in the content headers is supported by the targeted app platform.
“Authenticating users and negotiating with the DRM license server is the responsibility of the application and must be implemented by the player app developers,” Zambelli says. “In native apps this is done by integrating with either native OS APIs or 3rd party SDKs, while in HTML5 it is done via the Encrypted Media Extensions APIs.” Zambelli recommends a page at the website HTML5 Rocks for an overview of DRM support in HTML5.
There is also a trend of replaying live content. “Our clients build custom experiences that combine live and on-demand video. Live is still predominant as the most engaging video type, but VOD use is rising rapidly,” says Alden Fertig, vice president of product at Ustream.
“Our live playlist feature supports linear playback of VOD content as live,” says Fertig. This raises a question: Is it live or is this a new way to market VOD?
7. Analytics
It’s one thing to collect data; it’s quite another to create and derive meaning from useful analytics. Viewers can be very fickle, and app developers and publishers use analytics for insight into what works and what doesn’t.
“We measure everything. We have extensive analytics suites that we run across all of our applications,” Locke says. ”We focus on things like sessions per user per month, and content consumed per session.”
NBC News looks to its measurements to see if its consumers are incorporating its products as a part of their daily media consumption. “Improving those measures is something that is relatively in our control and is an area where we can deploy a lot of different disciplines to really improve the metrics,” Locke says. Everybody wants as much data as possible on what’s happening, from the moment viewing starts. Developers talk about having to integrate four or five analytics packages for their clients. Major analytics packages include Omniture, ComScore, Nielsen, Conviva, and Kochava, and each measures something slightly different within app activity.
“This was something that companies were starting to do 2 years ago and is now being seen as core to the business,” Johnson says. ”Once that happens everybody wants all the data that they can about how users are using [an app], how long are they staying in video, how are the interacting with video. It’s far more than what video did they watch.”
The more data you want to collect, the more you have to spend. But collecting data is only one part of the equation. The real value comes in in the analysis. How do you know if someone didn’t like the content, or had a problem with something else within the app?
“Now we’re thinking about going to track a particular workflow [to find out] what’s working and what’s not,” Prichard says. “Do people drop off at this one point? Is there something going on that we can fix and be more proactive around the experience?”
“Something that is very interesting is the proliferation of services that make it very easy to do advanced statistics on huge data sets,” Balis says. “Ultimately we can leverage things like machine learning to do that root cause analysis for us.” In this way, data really will be driving how your future app works.
8. QoS
The definition of quality of service (QoS) varies depending on who you ask. It can apply to many components of app delivery—the user experience, compression, transmission, delivery, and playback of content.
“I think there are a few things that have been really important for us. One is just a general emphasis on quality of experience,” Balis says. “And for us, that’s meant looking across all of the factors that contribute to the video experience, and not just the video player. We are an ad-supported business, so we have to consider ads an important part of the customer experience. For example, we’re working to eliminate the latency between content and ads.”
For Viacom, measuring and testing is standard procedure, and the company has moved away from reliance on third-party vendors as a way to promote improved QoS. “What we have been focused on is actually reducing our reliance on third-party components so we can own the technology stack,” Balis says. “We are looking comprehensively at video quality experience because we think that’s one of the things we can do from a product standpoint where we can really move the needle on customer engagement.”
Newsy has also preferred to own the technology for a number of reasons, including meeting demanding QoS objectives. “All of [our technology] is done in-house. That’s everything from our CMS to our teleprompter system, all the way up to our iOS apps, Apple TV apps, and Roku apps. We’re really a full stack shop,” Sabatinelli says.
Many people talk about QoS, but the measurement processes are key. “We have already built the first iteration of an in-house quality of experience platform,” Balis says.
Other industry representatives we spoke with felt that going to vendors for most or all of their technology needs allowed them to focus on their own core competencies.
“Consumers don’t really care about [the development process]. All that they care about is having a great experience that is fast and fluid and reliable,” Locke says. “You can really damage your brand’s relationship with a consumer by giving them a bad experience, and that’s very hard to recover from.”
9. Multiplatform Viewing
Viewers expect to be able to watch content on any device, and more viewers are looking for 4K. On the other hand, people increasingly want to watch content on smaller screens—producers have to see the entire spectrum.
“Roku right now is our most popular platform. Our fastest growing platform is Apple TV,” Sabatinelli says. Whether you choose to build you own apps or go to a vendor, another publisher suggests, “don’t boil the ocean”—pick your platforms very carefully.
Ustream has four SDKs—iOS, Android, Roku, and now tvOS—for customers to use to publish live and on-demand content to multiple platforms. “The Apple tvOS SDK has opened up the ecosystem, which previously was much harder, if not impossible, to publish to,” Fertig says. “Now anyone can create an app so they can publish content on to Apple TV.”
“One thing I see that is really big this year is multiplatform adoption,” Johnson says. “We’ve seen a lot of companies say, ‘This is core to my business.’ It’s another channel, it’s another way to get content to people on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Xbox, Windows, the variety of different platforms people are beginning to expect. Previously the telcos and the MVPDs were playing with apps, but I think they’ve now started to become core to their businesses.”
10. Playback
Of course, none of these factors matter if the video doesn’t play smoothly.
“Don’t forget about the playback experience,” Fletcher says. “Make sure you spend some time making sure the adaptive streaming is flawless, because a lot of people just plug that in and expect it to work well, and consumers will really fight back hard if their video stops playing in low bandwidth.”
“Another key takeaway from the past year is how much video quality drives engagement and time spent,” Balis says. Viacom will be increasing the amount of its content available in 1080p60.
Devices can now store large video files for playback, making offline viewing a possibility for some apps. Specifically, offline viewing appeals to some viewers who are traveling or have unreliable connectivity.
“We have some clients that are asking for download capabilities, but it’s not an across-the-board issue,” Johnson says. “Download is one of those things that we are keeping an eye on for clients and trying to figure out the usage, plus working out how much we think it’s going to be used vs. what is the cost to implement.”
Final Words of Wisdom
There’s a lot to focus on in the app world. A representative for one publisher says that while app development companies don’t come cheap, they are worth their weight in gold. Other publishers are building as much of the whole infrastructure as they can, without turning to outside vendors.
When we looked at apps in the 2015 Sourcebook, we saw lots of discussion about specific platforms, whereas this year, everyone talked about app strategy in a more holistic way, and as something that is central to their business.
The last word goes to Sabatinelli: “I think at the end of the day, if you watch something on a screen, it’s pretty close to television. Are we traditional television? No, but I think we’re the direction television is going.”
This article appears in the 2016 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook.
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