Actionable video insights: five things we learned from our webinar with NPAW

Now more than ever, data is playing an integral role in determining the success of OTT and streaming services. We spoke about this a few times already, yet it’s useful to reiterate again that data analytics – when able to generate actionable insights – sits at the core of any platform, informing business strategies as well as roadmaps for product enhancements.

Our Chief Product Officer, Lewis Arthur, was invited to speak at a webinar hosted by Simplestream’s insights and analytics partner NPAW. The conversation with Till Sudworth, NPAW’s Chief Marketing Officer, unfolded to try and provide an answer to a few key questions: what are the key performance indicators for live streams and OTT video in general? How do you ensure smooth delivery of a streaming service? How can you easily flag errors? ‍

We rounded up a few key insights. Read on to learn more and watch the full recording of the webinar at the bottom of this page.

🎦 2020-2022: two years of fierce competition. How is data analytics helping OTT services?

Content has been dominating the scene in the past 24 months, when the OTT and streaming industry has faced a number of new challenges. Qualitative experience metrics helped tech providers like Simplestream to stand out and provide the right insights to clients. Think of indicators such as Join Time, which tells us how long it takes for a user to consume content after pressing the play button. Without these kinds of figures, it would be difficult to depict the real performance landscape for OTT services. On the other hand, one thing is raw data, but extracting meaningful insights is slightly more complex, and a delicate process per se. The data taken from NPAW’s YouBora as part of our solutions, by using open APIs, can be transferred to any wanted touchpoint with a high level of accuracy, which is key for OTT operators.

📡 Live streaming, technology, and key metrics

Live streams bring to surface scalability as a first kind of concern. How can we scale, quickly, from 100 to 100,000 views? From an architecture point of view, video workflows have been progressively moving away from the concept of origin servers, and for live streams they instead utilise highly responsive storage services that connect directly to the CDN. Tracking performances always starts from Plays, the mother of indicators that informs every other metric. The duration of interaction (Average Playtime) per user comes next and tells you how sticky a platform is. It then becomes paramount to compare data that helps to anticipate and prevent churn risk. Buffer Ratio and Interruptions are also key metrics to take the pulse of a live streaming environment, because as an operator you want to ensure minimum friction to avoid users going elsewhere to consume content.

🚨 Real-time monitoring makes a difference

Analysing data as live events unfold has become more and more important for operators. Think of a scenario where at peak time, you can visualise quickly and in an easy-to-navigate way your real-time concurrency. In the case of a sudden drop – which is clearly something you need to avoid – a robust data analytics tool brings invaluable benefits, making it possible for you to quickly intervene and rectify the issue. At Simplestream, we found this particularly relevant during sporting events streamed in real time. We leveraged the alerting module of the NPAW suite to either AI-driven or manual alerts so that the system automatically flags errors to operators, with minimum delay.

🌍 Multi-dimension filtering

As audiences today can access content on a global scale and through a variety of devices, an additional element that comes in handy for OTT services are multi-dimensional filters, that can be applied to the main KPIs set for the analysis. This is the case of regions or even cities that are experiencing localised issues with their streaming performances. Having the opportunity to go more granular with the dissection of the metrics becomes the perfect ally to solve issues at the root. Equally, specific device-related hiccups can be sorted by setting specific filters to break down data that’s relevant to a specific platform.

📲 Second screens and a regionalised expansion

2022 is expected to be the year of mobile phones. This poses a new question about regions that are more or less mobile-driven than others. Second screening is a habit that’s clearly growing in the APAC region, where we are recording the most interesting growing figures in terms of small screens (mobile and tablet). Especially for Asian and African territories, this is mostly down to infrastructure – which is different from what we are used to in Europe and other areas. However, big screens seem to still be dominating the scene, overall, according to the data that comes out of the Simplestream’s client portfolio.

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