Balancing the Viewer Experience and the Need to Monetize

At the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, Brian Griffin, vice president of video product management for global digital media at Viacom shared thoughts on creating a smooth user experience and how that helps not only with viewer satisfaction, but with advertising. He spoke during a panel on balancing viewer experience and revenue needs. Doing more processing server-side is an important part of the equation, especially for multiplatform video.

"At Viacom, every single request now is how do we do something multiplatform. It's got to be here, it's got to be everywhere from a video point of view. It's a lot of the same things that you guys have talked about which is 'How can I get more of my business logic created server-side, so that on the client side I don't have to worry about figuring that out or rebuilding that every single time?'" said Griffin. "Also, it alleviates some of the issues of a lack of knowledge of how exactly video works on Android 2 versus Android 4. Someone just says, 'Hey, I just want it to work on Android everywhere, just make that happen because I've got a great idea: we're going go to monetize it and sell it.'"

Having a good encoding strategy is crucial to seamless playback and happy advertisers.

"The more that I can worry less about every single incidence of every single consumer experience, the better setup to success," noted Griffin. "Viacom's got to be on whatever platform that it's distributing. As far as backend and other parts of the back end, encoding is a really big part of --, having a good encoding strategy, of being able to deliver multiplatform, and that is obviously for your own content but also for the advertising that goes along with that. What we've seen is on the advertising side of things, primarily in a VOD space, is that a lot of the trafficking tools and some of that stuff really aren't set up as well as they ought to be for multiplatform distribution."

To view the full discussion and hear ideas from HBO, MLB.com, Turner Sports, and Dijit, watch the video below.

Balancing the Viewer Experience and the Need to Monetize

Making business decisions around the usability and the user experience for consuming video is often limited by budget, technical limitations of consumer devices, and business rules around the consumption of media. This presents evolving issues and problems for content owners to meet consumer expectations for a seamless and ubiquitous consumption. This session touches on issues such as design and usability in conjunction with technical features such as playback and interface functionality, ad integration, security concerns that may dictate streaming formats/DRM/conditional access rules, inclusion of social media functionality, metrics, and more as we examine the needs of content owners versus the desires of consumers.

Moderator: Michael Dube, Manager, Systems Integration and Operations, HBO
Speaker: Jeremy Toeman, CEO, Dijit
Speaker: Joe Inzerillo, SVP, MLB.com
Speaker: Pete Scott, VP, Emerging Media, Turner Sports
Speaker: Brian Griffin, VP, Video Product Management, Global Digital Media, Viacom Media Networks