How to build a new Data Infrastructure to support your streaming strategy
We all agree that a business’ performance is only as good as the data backing its insights. Yet, many streaming media organizations struggle with approaching, let alone identifying, the best way to renew their data strategy. Change may be the only certainty in the market, but that doesn’t mean all change strategies are the same.
When you aren’t sure of the combination of data, metrics, and tools you want to use, rebuilding your data strategy becomes even more of a headache. We’re prone to encountering a “chicken-and-egg-like” problem: you need data to understand the metrics and tools you want to use, but today we simultaneously need these metrics and tools if we are to have any access to data at all.
A New Approach to Data
In response to that conundrum, our team at Datazoom wants to share an approach that’s been successful for some of our customers who are currently planning their renewed data strategy with us, while also facing resource constraints. The strategy rests on establishing the minimum datapoints and toolsets for their web platform and then replicating and expanding onto other platforms like mobile and OTT.
Initiating your Datazoom experience on web SDKs is a worthwhile place to start because they: (1) are drop-in integrations that (2) can be updated using the Datazoom UI to add or remove data points and Connectors, while (3) enabling our team to act as a resource to code and build-out net new data points for your chosen Collectors which can then be activated from our UI with zero development or code changes.
A Plan for Action
Once we’ve established the right combination of datapoints and Connectors for the web properties, we use this as the foundation for developing, replicating, and expanding into other Collectors for efficient development and timely deployment.
For the above approach we:
1) Scope out 30 minutes with the web development team to perform the integration and “turn it on.”
2) Identify one SDK to remove/intermediate, using 3-5 “sanity metrics” to ensure parity between our SDK and the native SDK before phasing out the latter.
3) Repeat this process with other Connectors, one by one.
4) Deliver a finalized a list of Data Dictionary datapoints that all Collectors should supply, and begin the gap analysis (and any development planning) for other Collectors.
This approach minimizes the use of your team’s development resources and enables an iterative process for scoping and ongoing product planning. The reality is that defining the product and analytics stack before data is akin to “putting the cart before the horse,” which could result in issues when the strategy is deployed.
These problems include compatibility issues or setting timelines which are unachievable. Using Datazoom as a way to plan and test implementations gives you a place to perform experimentation while providing feasibility and timing feedback for structured, realistic, deployments.
You can set this plan into action right now when you visit app.datazoom.io/signup and begin your 15-day, 5GB free trial of Datazoom. Reach out to us if you want more information on how to get started or customizing your plan. We would love to hear out your use-case so that together, we can create an action plan to help you operationalize your video data.
