With the onset of Covid-19 pandemic, streaming services are witnessing an unprecedented opportunity of growing into mainstream entertainment. The rising number of users unexpectedly locked down in the safety of their homes, has placed huge pressure on the existing infrastructure of media industry as OTT video streaming has become the primary source of entertainment. With audiences ravenously devouring content, service providers are looking to stand out in the crowd.
This echoing topic was a major topic addressed in the MENA OTT and Anti-Piracy Webinar hosted by BroadcastPro, held between November 3 and November 5, 2020. A discussion that led all experts to agree on the importance of a solid platform of insights and analytics in order to answer to the rising demand for streaming services in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
During his intervention as a panelist in the webinar, Chief Technical Officer at ITWorksME Salloum ElDahdaah, qualified analytics as the backbone of any OTT platform. Learning how your audience is interacting with your video, looking for the content consumption that is driving the most engagement, getting to know which videos are performing best in terms of viewership and repeated plays, are the keys to retain users, procure them with targeted content and offer them a seamless viewing experience, Salloum stated.
Analytics is the most effective tool to identify your target audience and sketch a user profile by tracking peak watch times, user favorites, interests, genres etc.. Thus, offering captivating and curated content that shall secure a low churn rate and guarantee a high audience retention on your platform, he added.
“Proper collection and digestion of data is the most challenging part of online video industry. However, it was never fully extrapolated and covered by any of the multiple analytics providers we worked with”, ElDahdaah debated. He stressed that required data for accurate analytics must be a combination from both CDN and player sides. Data provided by the player related to the different types of devices the consumer is using, geographical location of your audience, viewership statistics and content performance should be incorporated with CDN-generated data including exact consumption of bandwidth, status codes, ASN numbers and caching percentage. This successful combination of CDN & player data is the ground for a big data interpretation structure that ITWORKSME team built internally, bringing to the market KWIKanalytics, a comprehensive and robust analytics platform that leverages multi-tenant architectures to understand customer behavior better.