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by THEO Technologies on November 29, 2019
Although video streaming allows companies to be more engaged with their viewers than ever before, delivering video also presents challenges. In today's video ecosystem, the landscape is changing with devices, viewer mobility and their demand for high quality video. When it comes to these challenges, data is a key driver behind understanding and making business decisions. The ability to analyze that data gives your organization the power to understand your video environment.
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WHAT ARE VIDEO ANALYTICS?
With the help of video analytics, organizations can receive accurate visibility of their video player performance in real-time. A video player analytics solution can be seamlessly integrated with your player and used to understand your audience while optimizing your costs. Using such a platform allows you to make data-driven decisions, both technical and operational, maximizing your revenue and player performance while minimizing lengthy processes.
Video analytics allow you to:
- Troubleshoot delivery and consumption issues
- Improve your customer experience and service
- Target specific segments of your audience, optimise for different devices and accurately measure and establish goals
- Give insights to make your player operate efficiently and effectively
This mini guide will explore and focus on what video player analytics are, and some of the metrics that are crucial to understanding your video player.
WHAT IS QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE?
Quality of Experience, or QoE, refers to the overall customer satisfaction with the video player. The list of requirements and the expectation from viewers is becoming larger, so the pressure to keep up is on. A video analytics and business intelligence platform from can provide a holistic solution that can be completely integrated with your video player. Video analytics give your organization the power to detect errors, predict behaviors, track progress, set up intelligent and personalized alerts, generate reports and much more, giving you the complete awareness and mastery of your viewer experience.
QoE is seen as one of the biggest challenges and an aspect that should not be overlooked. This is reflected through recent surveys.
A survey by THEO showed that 50% of the people looking for a video player solution are aiming to improve their QoE.
MEASURING QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE
QoE can depend on the content, content delivery network (CDN), network operator, the device and/or application, and the viewer behavior. Finding a harmonious balance between these factors can be difficult, and to make it more challenging, these factors can vary between regions, platforms and devices. To simplify this, there are metrics that can be measured regularly to give insights into the QoE of your player.
Analytics of these metrics allows you to actively manage your viewers and optimize the service your video player can provide for them. We have highlighted some of the most popular QoE metrics to measure and what insights they give.
- Playtime is the number of hours streamed on the platform.
- Average Effective Playtime is the amount of real time users have been
engaged with video content. The average time users are engaged with live
content is 11.65 minutes, and VOD is 9.56 minutes*. - Playtime vs. Join time provides detail on how the Join Time metric affects the
time users spend watching each video. - Playtime vs. Buffer ratio is how the buffer ratio affects the total time users
spend watching each video. Generally views affected by low buffer ratio last
longer than views affected by higher buffer ratios.
WHAT IS QUALITY OF SERVICE?
Quality of Service uses several metrics to measure the overall performance of a video delivery service, such as streaming platforms and video players, and focuses on how the performance of the service impacts users.
Several relevant aspects of the delivery service, such as Bitrate or Latency, are taken into account in order to carry out a quantitative measure of the quality of service.
Quality of Service (QoS) does not reflect on user perception, but rather the overall performance of the video delivery chain.
From a video player standpoint, monitoring QoS is very important, and closely related to the QoE, as QoE metrics can help you pinpoint what issues are coming from criteria comprised under QoS metrics.
Your viewers’ QoE is a direct result of your video players’ QoS.
WHEN ARE METRICS COLLECTED?
Metrics are collected dependant on whether they are QoS or QoE. QoS metrics, those pertaining to the video delivery service, are captured during the video content prep, delivery and access. QoE metrics are captured purely at the end point to capture the viewers' experience and their satisfaction.
When QoS and QoE metrics are collected.
IMPORTANCE OF MEASURING METRICS FOR YOUR VIDEO PLAYER
Integrating video analytics into your video player gives you descriptive and predictive insights on your player's performance in real-time. In the extremely competitive and rapidly changing video ecosystem, one bad experience could cost you a large volume of viewers and their loyalty. Players are continually adding new features and options, and the need to differentiate your player is crucial. Video players can differ in design, pre-integrations, and the networks they serve, so it is important to use an analytics platform that gathers data on a player’s unique features.
SOLVING BUSINESS, TECHNICAL AND OPERATIONAL PROBLEMS
Although metrics measure different aspects of the player or viewer engagement, they all intertwine and work together in various ways to investigate and understand a problem.
Measuring QoE and QoS metrics can help you find the answers to business, technical, and operation questions such as:
- Am I meeting my business goals?
- What issues are affecting my QoE?
- What does my user journey look like?
- How is my delivery when 70,000 people are
- watching simultaneously?
- How long does it take for the ads to startup?
- How is my viewer's quality of experience
compared to market standards?
HOW DOES YOUR PLAYER'S PERFORMANCE COMPARE AGAINST THE MARKET BASED ON QOE?
Comparing you player against the market can give you an understanding of your player’s differentiation, as well as what needs to be improved to keep up with market requirements.
These industry averages from NPAW's H1 2019 Industry Report give insights into how players are performing in the industry based on QoE metrics. These averages are for both live streaming and video on demand (VOD) platforms.
Industry averages provided by NPAW
ABOUT NICE PEOPLE AT WORK
NPAW — Nice People At Work — is a video intelligence company helping online streaming services grow. A global leader in its space, NPAW has a decade of experience developing groundbreaking and scalable analytics solutions to optimise performance and user engagement to build media experiences that maximise revenue. NPAW serves more than 150 video services and processes 100 billion plays per year worldwide.
YOUBORA, the company's flagship solution, provides OTT, broadcasters, telcos and media groups with advanced visibility of platform performance, audience behaviour, advertising and content efficiency in real-time to support informed, data-driven decisions.
THEO TECHNOLOGIES AND THEOPLAYER
THEOplayer is at the forefront of the video player industry. Our Universal Player with HTML5 capability provides organizations with a single player across all major devices, platforms and browsers. The Universal Player is pre-integrated with components including streaming, analytics, DRM, and advertising solutions.
We cover all industry segments and regions, and we are committed to being not just a vendor, but a solution life cycle partner. We understand that you want to create a unique experience for your customers, and our THEO experts are available from the inception of the solution through its evolution with innovations over time. At THEO we have the expertise to power some of the biggest publishers, broadcasters, telcos, and digital natives across the world, and we are ready to help you.