The Over-The-Top (OTT) video industry keeps growing at a rapid pace, offering consumers an increasingly diverse range of video content to enjoy on demand or live. With this growth comes the need for effective analytics solutions that can provide insights into how viewers are engaging with this content. OTT analytics solutions allow content providers to understand user behavior, measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and product releases, and make data-driven decisions to improve the overall user experience and deliver business growth.
However, with multiple OTT analytics providers on the market, it can be challenging to select the right one for your business needs. Each provider has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and choosing the wrong one could result in wasted resources and missed opportunities.
In this article, we discuss the four key factors you should consider when selecting an OTT analytics solution for your OTT service. By keeping these factors in mind, you can ensure that you select a provider that aligns with your business goals and provides the insights you need to make the right data-driven decisions.
1. Holistic OTT analytics: video and app insights
First of all, you should prioritize an OTT analytics platform that combines video and application-related insights — i.e. one with which you can track user behavior and quality of experience (QoE) within the entire video app, both during and outside of video playback. Often, content owners rely on separate analytics tools to monitor video and application performance, leading to data inconsistencies, interdepartmental silos, and a fragmentary vision of the business.
By merging these two domains with a single OTT analytics tool, you can gain insight into how technology-related decisions and challenges affect business performance and the other way around. Your teams can count on one independent source of truth, eliminating inconsistencies and encouraging collaboration. By having full visibility into your services’ performance, you can address service outages, quality issues, and individual user pain points faster, leading to quicker, more efficient daily operations and boosting user satisfaction.
You can learn more by reading our article on why it’s important to choose an analytics tool combining video and app analytics.
2. End-to-end OTT delivery chain monitoring
The next factor to keep in mind when selecting an OTT analytics solution is whether or not that tool can cover the entire OTT delivery chain.
You need to be able to ingest and monitor any external data from existing third-party integrations and data sources. You also need to be able to ingest data from your private and public CDN providers, allowing you to track the performance of each CDN in terms of QoE and implement a smart multi-CDN strategy. But there’s more.
Your OTT analytics tool should have in-depth network analytics capabilities, allowing you to conduct end-to-end root-cause analysis across all parts of your network. You need to know what parts of your network are experiencing problems, and how many users are affected. By identifying the root cause or issues in real time, you can quickly identify affected parts and users and mitigate the problem before it affects a larger part of your user base.
3. Flexible and customizable OTT analytics
Flexibility and customization are also essential factors to consider when selecting an OTT analytics platform. Your platform of choice should offer customizable analytics that meet the specific needs of your organization. This includes custom dashboards, widgets, and reports providing insights and metrics that are relevant to your video business. You want to be able to create highly specific filters and alerts, and work with the different levels of data granularity that your various teams need.
You should also look for flexibility when it comes to account management, choosing an OTT analytics provider that gives you total control over the creation and management of accounts. From creating as many accounts as your organizational setup requires, to defining the roles and permissions for each child account, your analytics platform should empower you to deliver each stakeholder within your organization with the insights they need while protecting sensitive information.
And there are even more levels of customization available. For example, the NPAW Suite’s new Custom App feature allows you to create customized analytics applications with your own branding, effectively enabling you to add the provider’s analytics capabilities to your value proposition when working with customers and external partners.
Interested in learning more? Check out our article on the benefits of customizable analytics.
4. Data privacy and security
Last but not least, data privacy and security are essential when considering an OTT analytics platform. Transparency and clear data ownership are crucial factors to consider, and it is vital to choose an analytics provider that outlines its data collection, storage, and processing processes. It is also important to ensure that the provider does not rely on third-party companies or tools that could compromise the data, and to seek vendors holding industry-standard certifications such as ISO 27001 and ISO 27701.
Control over data access and management is also important. Your OTT analytics platform should ideally offer features to create and automatically apply custom data privacy rules to comply with GDPR and make sensitive data accessible only to relevant stakeholders.
Read our intro guide to data privacy and security for streaming analytics to learn more.