What Questions Should Actionable OTT Data Answer?
Learn more about OTT at Streaming Media East.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Marc Maycas: We need to be able to trust in our data and make it actionable. "Actionable" is a word that you will hear me saying quite a lot here because, as I said, data for the sake of data is not worth it. So, this is also why NPAW and many other companies that are here are also working with the Streaming Media Alliance. We are an active company in the Streaming Media Alliance to help them build video metrics, video analytics that can help customers or companies like yours to succeed in terms of analyzing and guiding you on how you can make better decisions, thanks to data.
What if we could answer these questions with data? For example, why do we have quality issues right now, what are the root causes, and users affected? This is the main driver of this session, I will answer it later. How are my CDNs performing, which CDNs did they use or contract?
For example, we are seeing that the SLAs of the CDNs are not being met because actually, a CDN is not good 100% of the time. I can get the best CDN but at some time they will fail, or in some regions they will fail, or with some devices, the implementations that they have done for this particular streaming protocol are not good, so I'm getting problems in there.
So, I need to have all this information. Or maybe do or make use of a CDN load-balancing solution like I want to know what's the one that's the best but I know that this one performs best at these times of the day, this other one at these times of the day or they are having an outage or something, so I need to be able to give to my engineering team real-time data in order to take decisions in real time.
Is a customer complaint regarding quality issues legitimate? We have seen in the past some customers said, "We don't have any visibility, we don't need it, We have had a good weekend this weekend, we only had like 20 complaints in Twitter." We are like, "Okay, and you are taking this as valid data and so on, that's fine." One week later, "Hey we need to talk, "it seems like the 20 complaints we had on Twitter actually led us to like 20% of unsubscribes." And we're like, "Well, totally crazy."
Customers or end users usually don't give you all the feedback you need. And sometimes, even myself, I'm talking about my own experience, you feel like, "I'm not going to complain. It's the third time that I'm having this issue. I already complained twice, I don't want to complain anymore." And then you unsubscribe and search the content that you want to watch somewhere else.
So, what are my users' activity and consumption patterns, and on which devices? We already spoke about that, so we need to know them technologically and psychologically as well. Okay? We need to find that segmentation pattern, we need to segment our users because segmentation is key to actually targeting them more efficiently. Did I retain new users? Who will churn next month?
We also have a happiness score for ads. A happiness score is a metric that we internally created in NPAW where we are using all the quality of experience data from every single session and we are scoring it based on the different metrics that we're getting. So actually, in here, we want to know how our users are probably churning, or what's the probability of losing them in the next 30 days, for example? How are ISPs performing across regions?
Actually, it's kind of related to question number two because we know that ISPs have bidding issues and I would say that almost 80% of the times that we have a problem with the CDN, it's because of the bidding issue or something in between that the customer and also the end user don't know about the relationship between the CDN and the ISP itself. So, how can we detect those and how can we overcome them and then make sure that I'm calling the specific CDN and saying, "Hey, do you have a problem with Verizon, Comcast or Spain Telephonic or Vodafone?" for example. So, I can give you those insights in real time. So you can let them know that they have a bidding issue and then you're targeting them to the right spot where they need to look at, okay?
Why do users log in but don't watch content? So, sometimes, content is hard to find sometimes, content is not that good, and we also need data to in order to go into this space.
What is the most effective ad strategy, quality, quantity, position? So, the ad science can take us for one and a half more hours here, and I'm pretty sure that I could get a lot of feedback and a lot of interesting feedback regarding ads. But the thing is, ads are a solution for monetization but are a technical problem. Well, I would like us to talk about brands, I would like to talk about challenges and we are there. I know that there are companies that are doing a great job by doing SSAI or client-side, but we still need to go a little bit further.
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