Implementing a comprehensive streaming video analytics solution not only can take your video business to the next level – it has become a must in the increasingly competitive video streaming industry. Only services equipped with a deep understanding of their users’ experience and how to improve on it will succeed in the head-to-head race for the viewers’ attention.
Yet, in an industry famous for its jargon, pinpointing the exact benefits of these tools can sometimes be quite tricky. Here are 12 ways in which streaming video analytics can help your video streaming business reach new heights.
1. Deliver the best possible user experience
As it’s often echoed in the entertainment industry, content is king, but experience reigns supreme. With so many good content options out there and a myriad of services from which to choose, consumers tend to resort to the few platforms that feel just right.
Poor quality of experience is the single biggest driver of user churn. Video buffering, in-stream streaming crashes, and bitrate loss are all keeping your users away from your platform. In a time with plenty of choices of video platforms available to the end user, you can simply not afford to deliver a low quality of experience.
Discover how video streaming analytics can help you track and improve quality of experience here.
2. Streaming video analytics means real-time visibility
When it comes to managing a streaming business, having access to real-time data on every single part that makes your platform work is key. From knowing how your content is received to seeing what errors are impacting your viewers’ experience, a comprehensive video streaming analytics solution lets you take the pulse of your service from all relevant angles.
Thanks to real-time streaming video analytics insights, you can respond to changes in demand as they happen by allocating infrastructure resources accordingly. By identifying the root cause of an error or quality issue in real-time, you can increase the speed of mitigation and address problems before a greater number of users are impacted by them.
Find out more about how real-time, streaming video analytics can help you act proactively here.
3. All the insights you need, in one platform
A comprehensive video analytics solution brings together all the insights your various teams need into a single platform. No need to try to correlate disparate data sources from each department: every decision you make is based on an apples-to-apples comparison.
With a single streaming video analytics platform, you avoid the data inconsistencies of having different solutions and avoid the need for a costly correlation engine. Additionally, all your departments are looking at the same data, which eliminates data silo issues and provides performance metrics (e.g. number of plays) that everyone can use. Plus, implementing and maintaining various tools costs much more than having a single solution.
Explore how a single-platform streaming video analytics solution delivers end-to-end, actionable visibility into your streaming service here.
4. Deliver better customer care
When a customer reaches out with an issue they are experiencing, they are usually only able to report the symptoms: slow video playback, crashes, etc. Without further information, it is very difficult for support specialists to determine the root cause of the problem. With streaming video analytics insights at their fingertips, customer support teams can see exactly what went wrong in the user’s session with no need for explanations.
First-level support teams can solve issues without help from engineering or second- and third-level support, resulting in faster, more effective assistance. Less time spent troubleshooting not only impacts user satisfaction and retention, but it also helps your bottom line — reduced call duration and higher issue resolution rates mean significant cost savings.
Find out more about how real-time video streaming analytics can boost your customer care here.
5. Understand your audience
If you are looking to optimize your streaming strategy, knowing how much time your users spend on your platform or what devices they use to engage with it can go a long way. With streaming video analytics, you can prioritize your infrastructure resources to meet user demands and deliver the video experience for each user, region, and, device requires.
For example, the video quality requirements for a smart TV versus a smartphone are nothing alike. Neither is user tolerance to playback errors on each device. By having a good understanding of your audience’s device preferences, you can increase engagement while allocating infrastructure resources more effectively. This not only saves you money, but it helps maximize your infrastructure’s potential to stay ahead of the competition.
Discover what video analytics can do for your understanding of your audience here.
6. Segment your viewers
Furthermore, real-time audience insights and smart data capabilities allow you to define user segments based on your criteria of choice. You can provide each user group with the quality and experience they need, at scale.
For instance, smart user segmentation allows you to group your top users so that you can serve them with the higher quality they expect. Or perhaps you would rather prioritize quality for new users to loyalize them. Other useful user segmentation examples include grouping users by the device of choice, region, or network quality.
Find out how streaming video analytics can help you build solid user segmentation here.
7. Compare your performance against competitors
Tracking your performance to improve user engagement is all well and good. But how can you tell if you are doing well enough? An advanced streaming video analytics tool that processes billions of video insights from other leading services from around the world can help.
With such a tool, you can see how well you fare against the industry average across regions, devices, and more. No more guessing if your average bitrate is enough for your viewers when compared with other services, or if your video player crashes more than what is normal. You can monitor your performance in real-time and head-to-head with your competitors. It can also help you prioritize budgets internally. Knowing that you lag behind the industry average might make decision-makers think it twice the next time a higher budget is discussed.
Learn how your quality of experience fares with that of the competition with NPAW Benchmarks.
8. Build a stronger content strategy
The race for content is incredible. The two leading services today are spending on content the same amount the entire video industry did two decades ago. Thus, finding the right content and not wasting money on titles that are not appealing to your viewers is absolutely key to the success of the business. If your content fails, your business fails.
Whether it is by knowing what genres to put first or if it is best to opt for episodic or full-season releases, being aware of your audience’s preferences plays a decisive role in the development of your content strategy. So is understanding language preferences, or at what point throughout an episode viewers are jumping off.
Overall, analyzing the content consumption patterns of your users will help you to identify where and how to improve content production.
Dive deeper into the benefits of content-focused streaming video analytics here.
9. Reduce churn and increase marketing efficiency
Whether your streaming service is subscription or advertising-based, losing users is one of the biggest pain points you face as a business. Video streaming analytics gives you the ability to identify those users who are at risk of churn and act proactively to retain them.
By dividing your customers into segments according to their level of engagement and quality of experience requirements, you can address any issues affecting each segment and devise more targeted marketing campaigns. The result: happier, more loyal customers.
Learn more about how streaming video analytics can help you increase user retention here.
10. Improve your video app experience
Having visibility into your video player’s performance is not enough. You need to understand how your users navigate your video app, its sections, and its features before and after they watch a video. But also how your app is performing: stability, most common errors, etc.
A tool combining video streaming analytics with in-app analytics capabilities, like that of NPAW, gives streaming businesses the ability to monitor and improve the entire user experience. From tweaking UI/UX to improve content engagement to understanding what features or errors are holding users back, application analytics holds the key to enhancing your app.
You can find more information on how NPAW’s Application Analytics can help you build a better video app here.
11. Make the most of your ad inventory
When your monetization model factors in advertising, it is critical to have reliable, third-party insights into how your ads are performing and how your viewers react to them. A video streaming analytics tool can help you improve the efficiency of your ad strategy while making sure you are not abusing your users’ tolerance.
Having a second source of truth for monitoring your ad servers’ performance allows you to ensure all your ad slots are being filled appropriately. Additionally seeing what ad errors are affecting your users’ experience, helps you improve engagement and ad effectiveness.
Learn all about the benefits of video streaming analytics for your advertising monetization here.
12. Enable smart content distribution
Leading streaming service providers rely on more than one content delivery network (CDN) to improve their quality of service, reduce costs, and avoid outages. But, in a multi-CDN environment, streaming services need to switch between CDNs in a way that takes into account both your streaming quality and business goals.
When paired with video streaming analytics insights, a smart multi-CDN balancing tool like NPAW’s CDN Balancer lets services automatically select the right CDN based on the end user’s perceived quality of experience. Thanks to real-time video insights, the tool can detect performance issues and consumption patterns to optimize video delivery for each user, region, and device.