Why Video Streaming Fails, and Customers Hate You Because of It
What Our Data Said
Let's have a look at what our data said. In the month of April, we measured 122 million video sessions. We saw an 18% rebuffer rate on people delivering video. Maybe it's improved since the Conviva survey; maybe we're measuring more generously than Conviva. Either way, 18% is close to one in five. Neither of those numbers are good; whether it's Conviva’s 28% or our 18% almost doesn't matter. A lot of people who aren't measuring assume we're down in single digits, but we’re not.
If you ask people, "What video site is bad for you?" everybody will name a site. They'll say, "Facebook video is bad for me," or they'll say, "YouTube is bad." The thing is, everybody knows a site where the video streaming is bad. That means someone knows your site has video streaming that's bad in their area. It's very location- and time of day-dependent. It's very unpredictable where video is going to fail, or on what service. If you can switch to another service and see video working properly, then you're probably experiencing this issue.
Why Does Your Video Fail? And Does It Matter?
Why does it fail? It could be network congestion; it could be server meltdown; it could be you weren't paying for the fast lane. Really, who do we blame? It doesn't really matter. Your end user doesn't know about anybody's brand except for yours. They don't know about whether you had congestion because you were paying this service or that service, or the other service. Users don’t pay attention to those things. They just know video on your service was bad.
How Do You Fix It?
The solution is to take a totally different approach. You have to look at video playback and say, “How do we make it resilient? How do we make it able to withstand and recover from difficult conditions?” Essentially, that’s what’s happening on the internet all of the time.
Our solution was to make video playback resistant to failure. We actually put a brain in the video player. It lets the video player make decisions, and do things to help solve these video issues for you so that your end users aren't suffering from them. That way, too, the brand gets to help control the experience. They get to help say, "What are my problems? How do I solve this? Let me be proactive. Let me not just point the finger." Like I said, the user doesn't see that finger point; they just see your brand.
The Swarmify Experience vs. Other CDNs
Let's take a look at those 122 million video sessions we measured. People we surveyed were not just using our solution; the test group was multi-CDN. If you're going multi CDN, maybe that's how you get to 18%.
Our customers--less than 3% of our survey—experience fail-proof video delivery. Basically, by putting this brain in there, we do some really smart things on the delivery side. We manage the relationships and the brain is able to make decisions intelligently for each individual user and help solve those problems. Those problems are varied and it's very hard to pinpoint what is the exact problem. It's not always a bit rate issue; it could be the server meltdown, or myriad other issues.
By putting logic in the video player and making it more aggressive about figuring out how to solve those problems, we do a lot better. That’s the end result, and it’s what anyone who’s offering a video-on-demand service cares about. All the other pieces don't really matter. It's getting your content to your end users, making them happy, and making them love your service.
When they do that and your service is reliable and others’ services aren't, that alone is a competitive advantage. If you think back to the number cited earlier--51% of viewers bail when they see a rebuffer--and if you have an 18% rebuffering rate, that means every month, you're losing 9% of users because of rebuffers. That's what you're fighting against. I don't know why more people aren't talking about this issue. Whether we’re viewers or CDNs, we all hate rebuffering.
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