What is a Video Data Platform?
Video Data Platforms are emerging as an essential tool for businesses within the video streaming market.
But why?
For users, video streaming is ideally a seamless experience in which the videos play with excellent audio and visual quality. Several teams and many technologies work behind the scenes to cultivate this experience. These teams work to maintain and enhance Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics across the board.
How do they do it?
By analyzing relevant video data to gain insights and base decisions on their findings. However, the process has its limitations and can make it difficult for businesses to maximize the data they find. That’s why businesses are turning to video data platforms. But is it the right choice for you and your business?
If you’re considering a Video Data Platform for your business needs, here’s everything you need to know about Video Data Platforms and the benefits they can offer your business.
What’s a Video Data Platform?
Video streaming has taken over the internet, and we now consume more content through streaming services than we do through traditional cable, and consumption continues to grow at an impressive rate. Streaming has also expanded beyond news and entertainment, and now is being used by education, healthcare and corporate communications markets. And the growth in video consumption is not exclusive to the U.S.– Across the world, video streaming platforms have shown increasing video consumption rates. So it’s not surprising that Video Data Platforms are having their moment.
Video Data Platforms help provide data to understand what happens from the time a video file begins the multi-step process to be prepared for streaming at the “first mile” to the final consumption of the chunked video file on an end-user’s device at the “last mile.” The challenge is thow to make a video file available (and provide a high-quality experience) to users around the world, on any device, in any place, and at any time. As simple as that seems, it takes a lot of work behind the scenes to make that happen. Data, analytics, and insights power that work.
Video Data Platforms are dedicated to collecting analytics and data related to various steps in the end-to-end process that enables video streaming. This data provides vital insights about the actual performance and status of the systems and technologies used. These insights guide product, technology, operations and business decisions. Generally, data from these platforms is shared in real-time so that streaming video business, and services supporting them, can make manual or automated updates and changes to the end-to-end workflow and improve QoE.
For example, if your Roku app experiences video glitches or audio sync problems, your IT team will want to fix these issues for viewers as soon as possible, or risk losing viewers and revenue. A Video Data Platform collects data needed to perform a root cause analysis, which reduces the time spent by product, engineering, and operations teams to figure out what to fix, and thus minimizes opportunity loss. Moreover, this data can be shared with your support, marketing, and business teams, who can be prepared for incoming customer calls, draft a quick statement on your site’s status page, and many any necessary updates KPIs tracking business and revenue goals.
Why Your Business Needs a Video Data Platform
If you and your team are committed to providing a high-quality video streaming experience, then you need a comprehensive data solution to back your efforts. A Video Data Platform is one of the easiest ways of gaining access to the necessary data in real-time. However, the benefits of video data platforms don’t end there. Here’s a breakdown of the biggest advantages video data platforms offer:
One Comprehensive Solution
Having data to provide context from multiple systems in a single place blows the experience of switching between dashboards and reports to identify patterns and correlations out of the water. A streamlined approach begins with consolidating all the data you need into a single standard, and on a single platform. That’s why Video Data Platforms are emerging as the best solution to support the real-time nature of the streaming video business.
Creating Shared Understanding
Furthermore, its critical that that everyone in the organization speaks the same “data language.” This is as true for defining metrics as it is for the underlying data behind the calculations. Video Data Platforms provide a cleaned and standardized data set to use, and that means that although your team might use different tools, everyone can leverage the same data to drive critical decisions. With a majority of data scientists spending most of their time cleaning and preparing data sets vs analyzing data, Video Data Platforms provide a solution to increase efficiency and productivity to keep business moving forward.
Enabling Deep, Custom Analysis
Let’s say that one of your business goals is to deliver value to viewers — what KPIs should you use to measure that? Many might look at something like Active Users. But a better metric might be Engage Users, which you define as users who login at least 3x per week, and watched a total of at least 1 hour of content per week. Why 1 hour? Why 3 logins? Because you’ve examined your churn rates and you see that those customers who have subscribed the longest and return the lightest lifetime value meet those minimum qualifications. Joining this data with attribution data from your marketing campaigns can help you make smarter investment decisions with your marketing dollars.
Delivering Optimized User Experiences
Ensuring that your viewers experience a seamless and high-quality video is a challenging task due to the changing topology of the internet. What happens to your video stream when connectivity slows? What if someone gets in an elevator? Are they able to switch their stream from a mobile device to the big screen? Are embedded third party services, like advertising, able to adapt to the changes?
Having data in real-time enables a future where adaptation and automated changes can be deployed in real-time. Many CDNs and Cloud companies are investing in bringing compute and storage function to the “edge” — meaning closer to customers. The “edge” networks can be an intriguing solution to deliver adaptability in the video delivery workflow. A clean, standardized and real-time data set is tablestake to even begin testing these services, which will have only a couple of seconds or less to return a response.
Leverage Video Data Like Never Before: Datazoom
If you’re in the video streaming business, then you stand to benefit from a Video Data Platform. The earlier you make the investment, the sooner you can take advantage of the unique benefits and possibilities that your data can provide. However to maximize the value of your investment you need to choose the solution that best fits and adapts to your business, and that’s why you need Datazoom.
Datazoom is the first and most developed Video Data Platform to help you maximize and grow your streaming business. Our ecosystem of data collection, standardization and routing solutions are designed to support all streaming strategies. Want to learn more?
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