Video: How Can Live Streaming Deliver a More Innovative Experience?
In this excerpt from their panel at Live Streaming Summit, Level 3's Jon Alexander and Ooyala's Paula Minardi explain how taking more innovative, interactive, two-way approaches to enhancing the user experience for live streaming can propel the online video market into places that broadcast can't follow and keep online video viewers watching longer.
Learn more about streaming innovation at Streaming Media West.
Read the complete transcript from this clip:
Jon Alexander: What can we create on the internet that we can't create in a traditional broadcast environment? A lot of what we're seeing in the moment is people trying to replicate a broadcast experience. And it feels like we're largely there; the picture quality is there, the reliability is there, the accessibility across a range of devices is good now.
But we've effectively translated one experience to a new medium. We're delivering at an entirely different technology stack. They were able to recreate an existing medium. It feels like the next piece of innovation will be doing something that you can't do. Maybe that's two-way communication, maybe it's more immersive with consuming the content. But that, for me, feels like something that we'll see innovation on. It won't necessarily be at infrastructure level.
If the infrastructure's there, we can deliver live video today at high quality and pretty high scale, not quite television sized audiences, but it's good scale. But I didn't think that we've already driven innovation in the experience yet.
Paula Minardi: I agree. I think it's going to be a lot about experimenting now with different types of content for a particular platform, particular devices. Experimenting with what's working where and how people are watching, that's why we always sort of kind of promote the metrics piece of it, really looking at your data. So, some of the big metrics that our clients are looking at in live are: number of concurrent users that you have going, both at peak periods in a piece of content and over time. You know, how are they watching it even passed into VOD. Average time, length of time, looking at those QoS metrics, trying to understand the stream health.
Why are people dropping off? Is is because the stream's not good? Is it because I'm annoyed with the ad? And that's really important, too because it connects with the monetization piece. Because if you're starting to see people drop off, is it important that you want to feed them the ads before they're dropping off to make money, and you want to be able to make sure you can recommend other content that you have before they drop off so you can make more money. So, we're seeing a lot of that.
I think another type of content we've started to see, our Europe office had mentioned slow TV. It's big in the Nordics. It's sort of watching for an extended period of time. We just did something with Australian ballet on their website, but they also did it on Facebook Live, where it was like 20 hours where you're just watching behind the scenes of the Australian ballet. So, it's really just kind of immersing yourself completely into that world and that experience for a longer period of time.
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