How Much Online VideoQuality is Enough? Pinpoint the QoS / Engagement Sweet Spot

IP Video Management Analytics

IntroductionOnline video consumption is soaring, posting a record 25.6 billion views in August 2009 according to syndicated audience measurement firm, comScore.

But despite this spectacular growth, effective monetization of online video remains elusive for most content owners.Some digital media companies feel that the path to profits lies in maximizing quality of service (QoS) levels, believing that it will result in correspondingly higher viewer engagement levels and, in turn, happy advertisers.

In pursuing this strategy, however, content creators often assume — absent any hard data — that paying more for higher levels of QoS will yield proportionally higher levels of viewer engagement.But is this true? Does the additional investment in service quality actually result in longer engagement by the consumer?

With this white paper we will demonstrate how it is now possible to identify the precise correlation between viewer engagement and QoS and to identify the “sweet spot” at which both are optimized.

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IP Video Management Analytics

ProblemTo successfully tap the financial potential of surging online video viewership, content creators are scrambling to identify the optimal operational and editorial mix. As a result, most are focusing their efforts on improving the quality of the video itself.

In pursuing this goal, they hope to create a better user experience that will translate into a more engaged and involved viewer. The assumption being that higher engagement levels will entice viewers to consume more video content and, in the process, to be exposed to more advertising.

In their quest to improve video quality and the perceived user experience, content creators are investing in a bounty of performance enhancing technologies like:

• Multi-bitrate streaming, which allows higher quality streaming videoto play properly over Internet connections of varying connection speeds.

• HTTP-based streaming delivery (such as Microsoft Smooth Streaming),which enables adaptive streaming over the HTTP protocol.

• Higher bandwidth encoding. In order to offer viewers even higherquality video, many content owners are now encoding their videos at750Kbps or higher, as HD video begins to pick up momentum.

But will investing in these technologies and the additional incremental quality that they provide result in proportional increases in viewer engagement? To date, there has been no means to conclusively answer this question.

Instead, content creators have been left to hedge their bets and stockpile increasing levels of service quality in an escalating QoS arms race where it is assumed that “more is better.”

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Why this problem existsTwo primary hurdles have prevented content creators from understanding the relationship between quality and engagement.

• There has not been a solution that captures the user experience from within the video player itself.

Instead, those interested in monitoring service quality have had to settle for network and server- side solutions. These services try to simulate real-world conditions, leaving customers to extrapolate from the results. By virtue of their data collection methodology, these services are saddled with limitations including:

Incomplete data because it is sampled

Staged environment that relies on robot servers rather than real users

Infrequently updated data, uploaded as little as once an hour

• There has not been a way to combine and correlate QoS and viewer engagement data.

As previously mentioned, QoS data is collected by sampling at the network level. Viewer engagement metrics, by contrast, are captured at the video player level. As such, there has been no way to combine and correlate the two.

This gap prevents content creators from truly understanding the quantifiable value that each incremental increase in quality yields as premium services are added to the base cost of content delivery.

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Solution to the problemSkytide Insight for Flash Video Players uniquely solves this problem by combining and correlating viewer engagement and QoS measurement in a single player-side solution. Pasting just a few lines of code into the Adobe Flash Player is all that is required to deploy the service. Four interactive dashboards serve as an intuitive interface to access the reports.

General StatisticsProvides overview of who is watching which videos, when it is being watched and from where it is being viewed.

• General daily trends• General time of day statistics• Ranking of top videos• Ranking of top countries

Video EngagementTracks how users interact with specific videos.

• Ranking of most watched videos• Ranking of most engaging videos• Daily trend metrics including average play time, most

watched portion of a video, percentage of video viewed, average number and duration of pauses and rewinds

Quality of Service

Tracks how video quality affects viewer behavior.

• Correlates playing time, view & coverage percentage with measured bandwidth or wait time percentage

• Correlates any two: seek time, rebuffer time, buffer size, rebuffer count, wait time, rebuffers / play

Marketing & DemographicsMore detailed information on geographic viewership data.

• By country• By region• By designated market area (DMA)• By time of day

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By identifying the “sweet spot” at which viewer engagement and QoS levels are optimized, Skytide Insight for Flash Video Players unlocks the answers to vexing questions like:

• Will investing more in QoS pay out with higher viewer engagement levels?

• Should I switch to a different CDN?

• How much service quality is good enough?

• Should I add or remove an encoding level in my “portfolio”?

• What QoS levels will users tolerate before it adversely effects engagement levels?

• Should I invest in adaptive streaming?

By answering these questions, content creators can quickly realize very tangible benefits from Skytide, including:

• Eliminating unnecessary investments in service quality; paying for only the minimum threshold necessary to maximize viewer engagement levels.

• Saving money by getting the functionality of two solutions for less than the price of one.

• Reducing the resources needed to manage two separate analytics solutions. Implementing Skytide Insight for Flash Video Players requires just a few lines of code, so it requires only minimal IT resources.

Business Benefits

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Viewer Engagement & QOS ScenariosBelow are a few hypothetical correlation scenarios that demonstrate how Skytide Insight for Flash Video Players can be used in practice.

No Correlation

If you were to see this relationship, it would tell you that investments in increased quality are unlikely to yield proportional returns in viewer engagement, ad impressions or revenue.

Continuous Correlation

Every increase in service quality yields some increase in engagement. Identifying the “elasticity” of engagement to QoS at each level enables detailed cost-benefit analysis.

Diminishing Yield

Increases in service quality yield initial viewer engagement gains, then plateau and have little further effect. Identifying this enables businesses to pay for only the minimum threshold necessary to maximize viewer engagement levels.

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Potential Cost ImpactBy understanding the relationship between QoS and viewer engagement, it is possibleto make more informed decisions that profoundly impact in the following scenarios.

CDN Decisions

A CDN promises higher transmission quality but charges 5% more per GB. Should they be awarded the business?

Conducting a pilot test that uses Skytide can verify whether the better video quality leads to a comparable increase in viewer engagement & ad revenue.

If increases in quality do not lead to corresponding engagement increases, you have the hard data to support forgoing this CDN and saving 5% of your CDN costs (hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per year).

Streaming Decisions

Consideration is being given to implementing dynamic streaming.

Doing so will require 3 engineers for 3 months, however. Is this a good decision?

Skytide can quantify whether reducing the incidence of stalls — a selling point for dynamic streaming — will generate an equivalent increase in viewer engagement & ad revenue.

If the reduction in stalls doesn’t lead to similar gains in engagement, then you just saved up to $150,000 by not investing in an unnecessary technology.

Encoding Decisions

Discussion turns to making an additional higher bit-rate encoding of the video library available. Is this a good decision?

Skytide can identify whether increases to effective bandwidth trigger a proportional increase in viewer engagement & ad revenue.

If increases to effective bandwidth don’t pay out in higher engagement levels and ad revenue, you just saved about 20-30% of your encoding costs and 1-3% of your CDN costs (hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per year).

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ConclusionContent creators who are investing considerably to improve QoS but cannot correlate its affect on viewer engagement are effectively paying a “quality tax” — purchasing higher levels of service quality than are needed to maximize viewer engagement.

Skytide Insight for Flash Video Players is the only solution that combines and correlates QoS and viewer engagement in a single package, so businesses can pay only what is necessary on video quality and not a penny more.

It is an important part of Skytide’s Digital Media Performance Management suite, an integrated collection of hosted applications that connect and correlate all the important data sources that drive digital media operations — web analytics data, CDN streaming and storage logs and ad network data.

To learn more about Skytide and how we can help you get a clear and complete view of your digital media business, contact our sales team at 510-250-4275 or sales@skytide.com

IP Video Management Analytics

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