Video: How Analytics Can Make Your Live Streams More Successful
What are the most effective analytics and metrics for growing the reach and profitability, and improving the effectiveness of your live event streams? Conviva's Dylan Armajani, Steven Lacoff of Comcast Wholesale, Justin Liu of Akamai, and Chris Mangum of Yahoo! offer practical tips on how to measure what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and how to build your audience and improve your streaming ROI in this segment from their panel at Live Streaming Summit.
Learn more about streaming analytics at Streaming Media West.
Read the transcript of this clip:
Dylan Armajani, Conviva: The first thing before you decide on metrics is actually to look at the bottom 10% of your audience and the top 10% and then start to look at what's different. What you'll find is video start up time matters a lot for some customers. For other business models, it doesn't matter. If you have really compelling content and the user's going to be sitting there for two hours watching it, it doesn't really matter if it loads in two seconds or four seconds across every device. You may find that something like the bit rate matters a lot more to them. Then again, if you're more of a news talking heads, the bit rate might matter less and rebuffering is going to matter more, because the interrupts, when they actually can't hear the voice, is going to be a lot more jarring. What we really recommend is look at the bottom of your audience, look at the top of your audience and find what's causing users to stay and what's causing users to leave. Then you can choose which KPIs you should be looking at.
Steven Lacoff, Comcast: Conversion, whether it's a click-through, whether it's some kind of electronic sell-through. What are the conversion rates? I would say the next bucket is QoE. I think we've talked about all the core metrics there. The key is buffering, right? That's at the top. Then, depending on content type, whether it's short form or long form. You could make an argument that bit rate or start up time is ... You could debate which one of those is second. The third are QoS metrics. Uptime, availability, what type of errors are you receiving from various components within the infrastructure.
Justin Liu, Akamai: Understanding how long someone actually stays in a single bit rate. You might start off with a really wide gamut of different bit rates--you're doing that because you're trying to adapt and provide a seamless-as-possible experience. At the same time, you're creating more renditions, you're creating more work into the workflow as you find that certain bit rates aren't as necessary. It's good to know that there's some that are just stopgaps that are very little used, and they may not be worth the op costs.
Chris Mangum, Yahoo!: If you've got an analytics measurement tool where you can drill down to the ISP or the city that will tell you what specific rebuffer ratios or where your problem is, you can isolate your problem and shift traffic to a different CDN and maybe performing better in that particular region, that will help quite a bit.
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