Video: How to Use Metrics and Experience Strategy to Increase Viewer Engagement
Learn more at the next Content Delivery Summit.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Ed Haslam: What are we measuring? We're measuring QoE data like I said, bitrate, buffering, or what we call rebuffering ratio, the percentage of time the consumers sit in buffering versus watching content. Also, the resolution of the video coming through, along with about 30 or 40 other QoE metrics because there are things like seek-induced rebuffering and network-induced rebuffering. It gets very esoteric and arcane, but then equally important is measuring engagement data. How long did the consumer watch? What were they watching? And then you can do big data correlation where you can correlate quality of experience to engagement.
That's the key aspect to this. You have to understand that really in the end, what publishers care about, what HBO or Netflix or CBS or NBC or Sky in the UK care about, is how long did you watch? Are you watching more? Are you telling more people to watch? Are you referring our content? QoE is a good forward indicator of engagement, because if that buffering symbol comes up, you might watch less and that's what we call an experience strategy.
Most publishers out there today, in the world of data, do a lot around content strategy. Content acquisition, original content programming, and they think, “If I just create great content people will come.” Well, the reality is underneath the water line there's this whole thing called experience, which is will people really watch if they see a buffering symbol? If it takes 10 seconds for the video to start on your Android device? If the bitrate on your Roku and your high-definition TV suddenly downgrades for you? Will you change the channel even though it's Game of Thrones or Westworld or one of these other compelling original content series?
What we've seen is that people do change the channel. In fact, it looks like this. This is a PC mangling the numbers, but this is actually from Conviva data. Conviva measures around 80 to 90 of the world's largest OTT publishers--the ones I mentioned earlier, eople like HBO, and Sky and CBS, NBC. This is from 2011 to 2015 and what you see here is a 1% change in rebuffering, so if it rebuffers for 1% more, engagement drops in each of these years by this number of minutes. The interesting thing here is that we as consumers are becoming less and less tolerant of quality issues. We're expecting the internet to get better and if it doesn't, we're changing the channel and watching other content, which is there you see up to 16 minutes less engagement if rebuffering changes by 1%.
This is what I mean by the correlation and doing big data to correlate these experience metrics to engagement data.
Related Articles
Urbanist's Ariel Viera, USGA's Scott Lipsky, and CBS Sports Radio's Damon Amendolara discuss the most effective ways to measure viewer engagement in this clip from Live Streaming Summit at Streaming Media East 2018.
12 Jul 2018
At Content Delivery Summit 2017, Jon Alexander explain why rebuffering metrics are so critical to gauging end-user QoE and pinpointing delivery issues, and how analysis of those metrics can help content publishers optimize delivery with great specificity.
22 Feb 2018
CBS Interactive's Zac Shenker and Level 3's Ryan Korte discuss the challenges of meeting heightened user QoE expectations for live streams in this clip from Streaming Media West 2017.
09 Nov 2017
CBS Interactive's Zac Shenker, Vimeo's Matt Fisher, Hudl's Brian Kaiser, and the New York Times' Flavio Ribeiro discuss key QoE metrics for assessing player performance and optimization in this clip from Streaming Media East 2017.
29 Jun 2017