Conviva Adobe WP FINAL

 

Conviva and Adobe Primetime: Bringing quality and deliverability for the betterment of OTT television

by Conviva for Adobe

 

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Over-the-top (OTT) TV, where viewers watch live, linear and on-demand programming on internet-connected devices, is becoming central to the overall TV experience. OTT began when new pay-TV entrants used the Internet to bypass conventional TV distribution methods. Today, new and established pay-TV providers alike are growing their OTT footprint. For pure-play OTT providers, investments tend to target subscriber growth and international expansion. For established payTV providers, OTT investments are more about customer retention and winning back cordcutters. Whether an OTT provider wants to win new subscribers or keep existing ones, one thing is certain: the quality of the user experience is fundamental to success. Conviva research shows a clear and direct link between issues like buering and subscriber churn. It also shows that quality of experience (QoE) is the number one factor that consumers consider when choosing an OTT service. In addition, IAB research shows that viewers place signicant importance on things like picture quality and fast streaming.

In this white paper, we’ll look at the trends driving the shift in consumption toward OTT; the coverage and quality challenges media companies and OTT providers face with delivery; and the playback platform and QoE solutions currently available for solving them. Then we’ll introduce the Conviva and Adobe Primetime solutions and oer some recommendations and examples of how to combine them to maximize that most fundamental of TV business needs – growing and maintaining audience – by delivering the best quality and coverage across the widest range of devices and platforms.

 

The Path to OTT dominance Viewers today have a wealth of OTT options to choose from. They can leverage an OTT or TV Everywhere service from their current multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD), such as their cable or satellite TV provider. They can also supplement or replace a traditional TV package with one or more directto-consumer OTT services. services. Uptake is strong across these options. At the end of 2014, more than 40% of US homes were subscribed to an OTT premium service. In TV Everywhere, 13.6% of pay-TV households consume authenticated streaming streaming video content from their MVPD, according to the Q3 2015 Digital Video Benchmark report by Adobe Digital Index. It is no exaggeration to state that the $400B television industry is in transition to Internet delivery. delivery.

The stakes are high for the internet television market. $400B television revenues are in transition to the Internet

$37B $167B

$208B

Global

$15B $76B

$89B

PUBLIC TV US

AD-DRIVEN TV PAY TV

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TV devices, then and now The TV device landscape has changed as well and is vastly dierent compared with the early days of television. In the 1970s, 70% of American households had one TV or less. Today, 65% have more than three. Add to that the 6+ IP-enabled devices devices (PCs, tablets and smartphones) found in the average American American home and most households now possess nearly nearly 10 screens. And in Europe, the numbers are even higher. The new math m ath of o f the multiple-TV and -device household has forced media companies to rethink their distribution strategies.

Clearly, TV consumption preferences and habits are changing, and viewers across all demographics —not just the oft-ballyhooed Millennials—are abandoning conventional TV at a rapid rate. Even baby boomers now get 20% of their TV and lm content from a streaming source. According to a 2015 Conviva research study, overall conventional TV consumption in the US declined by 7%. A similar study by Accenture reported an even steeper global decline of 13% . Conventional TV’s loss is IP-enabled TV devices’ gain. In 2015, the viewing of TV and lm content increased across all non-conventional devices, and the jump was far from marginal. Time spent viewing on tablets increased by 91%; viewing on smartphones increased by 39%; viewing on TV connected devices increased by 28% and viewing on PCs increased by 9%.

YOY CHANGE IN VIEWING TIME SPENT BY DEVICE FOR AN AVERAGE WEEK (MAY 2014 - MAY 2015) Source: “Comparable Metrics: Q2 2015”, Nielsen, Dec. 2015    s    e    t    u 100%    n    i    M    s 80%    s    o    r    G 60%    n    i    e    s    a 40%    e    r    c    e    D 20%    r    o    e    s 0%    a    e    r    c    n    I -20%    %

91%

39% 28% 9% -1% Tablet Video

Smartphone Video

Connected TV Devices

PC Video

TV

 

Quality is now everything As more and more people take to their PCs, phones, tablets, game consoles and connected TV devices to watch their favorite programming or live event, the industry has mobilized to accommodate them. Today, practically every media company has a streaming oering. But while IP-delivered video is the new norm, the quality is far from consistent across OTT oerings. And herein lies the biggest challenge for media companies. Viewers not only expect to be able to watch their programs and lms on any device, they want the same – or better – quality that they experience with their conventional TVs.

TV quality and the overall viewing experience is quickly becoming the litmus test for video engagement and loyalty. In a 2015 consumer study, Conviva found that 35% of viewers picked quality as the key consideration when deciding on a streaming video service. Quality of experience (QoE), in fact, outranked all of the other factors, including price, brand recognition recognition and even breadth of content. In other words, to maximize audience goals, services must provide a superior QoE.

WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN CHOOSING AN OTT SERVICE? Source: Conviva “2015 Consumer Quality Report”

Quality of Experience

35%

Amount of Content

32%

Price

Recognizable Brand

0%

23%

7%

20%

40%

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Not only is QoE the key consideration for what viewers watch, it’s also quickly becoming becoming the deciding factor for how they watch and even whether they decide to stick with or abandon a particular program or service. In its annual Video Experience Experience Report (VXR), Conviva highlights the direct correlation between the quality of the viewing experience and consumer engagement and churn. The report analyzed billions of consumer streams to uncover the impact that a small (one percent) increase in video playback caused by buering would aect viewer engagement patterns. Buering is usually caused by an issue in the delivery network and typically causes the video to stop or slow while the stream catches up to the player. While it should come as no surprise that people don’t like buering, what was surprising is how dramatically the intolerance for it has grown over the ve years covered by the VXR.

In 2011, Conviva determined that a one percent increase in buering would reduce consumer viewing time by three minutes. Four years later the expected loss of engagement has more than quintupled. Even more concerning for media companies companies is the long-term eects on churn: in addition to watching less, 58.4% of respondentss said an interruption would make them less likely to watch or use the service in the future. respondent

DELIVERY ISSUES LEAD TO ABANDONMENT Source: Conviva “2015 Consumer Quality Report”

HOW LIKELY ARE YOU TO WATCH

ENGAGEMENT REDUCTION (IN MINUTES)

FROM THAT SAME SAME PROVIDER AGAIN?

WITH 1% INCREASE IN BUFFERING 2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

-3

8%

6.6%

LIKELY

VERY LIKELY

MINS

-8 MINS

-11 MINS

33.6%

24.8%

24.6%

VERY UNLIKELY

UNLIKELY

UNCHANGED

-14 MINS

-16 MINS

58.4% CHURN RISK

 

The Internet was not made for IP-delivered video IP-delivered IP-delive red video—in all of its dierent instantiations—is here to stay. To attract and retain viewers, media companies not only have to oer great programming, they also must ensure coverage and broadcast quality across every device. device. The Internet, as it turns out, wasn’t built for streaming HD video or multimedia of any kind. What it was made for was sending small packets of information that could be asynchronously re-assembled into text messages on a green and black screen, not massive multimedia les that need to be loaded simultaneously and displayed smoothly in millions of vibrant colors.

While technological advances in everything from microprocessing to broadband and media encoding have made the streaming of HD-quality video possible, it has not given media companies any more control over the Internet. Video quality is determined by many factors, including the trac and peering arrangements arrangements of individual Internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery networks (CDNs) that are outside of media companies’ inuence. What the media companies and OTT providerss can control is the playback platform and the provider quality of the stream to the player or device. But even that is unavoidably complicated, complicated, especially when considering the multiplicity of factors that go into optimizing the stream for just one player and device. Now, multiply that by a growing number of devices and players and the challenges of full coverage seems to approach a level of dizzying complexity.

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Fortunately, these challenges are solvable.

In the following sections, we’ll explore and evaluate the OTT platform and QoE solutions available today and provide some recommendations and examples of how OTT services can combine the best of them to maximize their audience metrics, by providing consumers with fully-optimized coverage across the widest number of players and devices.

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Solving for delivery often leaves quality out of the equation Popular OTT services like Crackle, HBO, Netix and Amazon all provide their viewers with a simple and seamless experience experience that contributes greatly to their success. But that simplicity hides the dicult, and expensive-to-replicate, expensive -to-replicate, investment investment of time and resources that it took to deliver that experienc experience. e. Streaming video over an IP-enabled device is an inherently complicated business. It not only requires technology stacks for media ingesting, encoding and, of course, playback, it also needs others for managing content and customers. As a business, it must also be able to generate and capture advertiser and or subscriber revenue, as well as increase those revenues through the integration of sales and marketing analytics and optimization.

Until recently, the playback platform and QoE choices available to most OTT service providers invariably included some kind of compromise, in terms of control, coverage or quality, or a combination of the three.

Let’s quickly take a look at those options and their respective advantages and limitations.

 

Going it alone While the idea of building your own playback platform is tempting from a quality and control perspective, the diculty and expense of doing it successfully have been well documented. With a few exceptions, the technological expertise and experience required required is outside the skillset of most in-house teams. Even the companies that manage to acquire the required capabilities and solve the complexities of multi-device playback playback are still left with an incomplete solution. To the playback stack there must be added modules for content encoding and management, rights management and protection, advertising, monetization and marketing. Because each of these capabilities involve their own workows and ways of structuring data and information, the challenges of integration and normalizing data across all stacks grow more complex and expensive with each addition.

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Toward a more complete solution

The unied OTT platform As OTT continues to grab a bigger share of overall TV revenues, the ability to go to market quickly with an OTT service will only grow in importance. As we’ve reviewed, the streaming services that have had the most success are the ones that are able to monetize the widest possible audience at the highest level of quality and device coverage. Replicating that success—at market speeds—requires an advanced, integrated multi-stack multi-sta ck OTT platform that precludes building it yourself or cobbling it together from multiple existing pieces. Fortunately, the need for a unied solution has not been lost on the industry, and a few have risen to the challenge. But not all unied platforms are equal or oer the same level of capabilities or services. When evaluating an OTT platform, it’s important to ensure that they at least oer the following capabilities.

 

Deliver TV Everywhere The Internet is an experiment in controlled chaos, and the absence of a true video standard leaves content providerss with a multitude of players, platforms and protocols on which to develop. When choosing a provider platform, look for one with an adaptive HLS player and a developer-friendly developer-friendly SDK toolkit. The combination will make it easier to customize and deliver a seamless viewing experience across the greatest number of connected TV devices, tablets, smartphones and game consoles.

Unlock pay TV content on any device Pay-TV subscribers expect to access their programming from any IP-enabled device. Selecting a platform with an authentication capability enables subscriber subscriber verication and entitlement management across all pay-TV sites and apps, netting higher customer satisfaction as well as a potential source of new ad revenues.

Monetize audiences across every screen OTT services provide an exciting opportunity to generate additional ad revenues. Ensuring the OTT platform can accommodate client and server-side dynamic ad insertion for VOD, linear and live video content permits seamless TV-like ad experiences experiences with no buering or playback errors. Also validate the solution can isolate experience metric issues in real-time to retain audience.

Protect your content The protability of OTT services has been built on the back of strong, and hard won, intellectual property protections. The chosen platform should also include a scalable and robust digital rights management (DRM) capability. One with a variety of license delivery methods which aords safe publications of digital content and leverages full device coverage to monetize the widest possible audience.

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Advanced QoE monitoring and optimization While OTT providers have ready access to their own audience and engagement metrics telling them who’s watching what and for how long, they have very little insight into the reasons why the numbers are what they are, nor how they measure up to other competitors in the space. With broadcast programming, a drop in views, for example, can be directly attributed to content or scheduling. But with OTT content, so many other experientiall factors—ISP trac, start time, buering, and experientia others—come others—com e into play that it’s impossible to make the same inference without data to benchmark the viewing experience. experienc e. Likewise, those benchmarks are only valuable when compared to industry numbers, which create the necessary context to understand how ‘good’ the viewing experience really is.

Until recently, the QoE metrics that could complete the story have been one-dimensional, one-dimensional, dicult to obtain on an actionable basis, and nearly impossible to normalize across the range of devices, players players and platforms. But today, thanks to a handful of vendors, businesses have access to multi-dimens multi-dimensional ional QoE solutions that not only can monitor each stream in real time for over a hundred experience metrics but also normalize and correlate the data with engagement and audience KPIs for the most complete picture. Providers can also access a rich library of current aggregated metrics metrics to place their own results into the context of the market at large. But, again, a wide gap in capabilities separates some vendors from the others. When evaluating video QoE solutions, you want them at a minimum to be able to provide the following.

 

Deliver a clearer picture of your viewers’ experience, across multiple dimensions A true measure of the viewer’s experience goes well beyond the quality of the picture on the screen or delity of the audio coming from the speakers. To get an accurate picture, you to need to track somewhere between 130 and 140 individual KPIs, and capture everything from engagement metrics, such as video completion rate, to experience metrics, such as startup time and buering ratio— across multiple dimensions, including device, ISP, CDN, location, and content and format type. These then must be easily correlated to the audience metrics that are at the heart of running a successful service. This provides the historical and real-time data needed to benchmark the QoE metrics for each device, player and platform and give every viewer the best TV experience possible.

Correlate experience with engagement and audience metrics for better business decisionmaking The metrics for experience, engagement and audience don’t exist in a vacuum. When you can connect the dots between audience, engagement and experience, you get the comprehensive view of your content, aliates, CDN partners and other variables needed to make the important strategic decisions about your business.

Provide actionable intelligence to pre-empt problems Even when a QoE solution claims to have real-time data capabilities, a sudden spike in trac can cripple its ability to deliver on it. Make sure your solution has the proven ability to scale, so even when the trac reaches millions of streams you can still capture and analyze the data, and source and solve the issues before they become problems.

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Conviva and Adobe Primetime: The benets of integration Adobe Primetime When Turner Broadcasting came to Adobe in 2009 with the idea for TV Everywhere, there were few other companies in existence, if any, with the technological experience experience and capabilities to make the ambitious project a reality. The result of that collaboration was the Emmy-award-winning Adobe Pass, now Adobe Primetime authentication. It enables pay-TV subscribers to access live, linear and VOD content on any IP-enabled device. Through Adobe Primetime, billions of global viewers have been able to share in the enjoyment of premier events like the Olympics, the Academy Awards, and Super Bowl XLIX — as well as their favorite regular programming — on their own time and terms. Today, Adobe Primetime is widely recognized as the industry’s premier OTT platform solution. Even OTT pioneers, such as MLBAM and Turner Broadcasting, recognize Adobe’s advanced capabilities and leverage Primetime to insert ads, provide authentication and DRM, power playback and live streams and ensure consistent coverage across more than 400 devices.

With Primetime, OTT service providers not only get the most advanced and device-compatible device-c ompatible live, linear and VOD player but also a fully integrated stack to leverage existing broadcast workows and monetize, run and optimize their business.

 

AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT

ENGAGEMENT MEASUREMENT

EXPERIENCE MEASUREMENT

COMPREHENSIVE INFORMATION Experience directly supports top-line business goals

Conviva Like Adobe Primetime, Conviva possesses a technological and experiential edge that has made it the leading provider of Experience Management solutions, and choice of premier content providers like Sony, HBO, ESPN, CBS and Sky. Through its services services,, Conviva analyzes more than 4 billion streams per month on 1.6 billion unique devices, giving its users unparalleled intelligence intelligence of what is going on around the globe and how it’s aecting video performance over the Internet. By recording detailed real-time information on each viewer for every session, OTT providers not only get insight into what is happening but the intelligence and tools to preempti preemptively vely x issues before it aects viewership.

What can Conviva and Adobe Primetime do? Adobe Primetime’s integration with Conviva creates a new standard for OTT platforms. To Primetime Primetime’s ’s capability of creating a video business for any device, Conviva’s QoE stack adds the ability to instantly diagnose issues and enable service resiliency.

W h   a   t    c   a  n  C   o n v  i   v   a   a  n  d  A   d   o  b   e P  r  i   m  e  t   i   m  e  d   o  ?  

 

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VIDEO APPLICATION

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Adobe PrimeTime Player

Conviva PrimeTime Client Library

Internet

Collects Adobe PrimeTime video quality data and ships it to Conviva Platform

Conviva Platform Ingests incoming video quality data and computes end-user Conviva Pulse metrics

Get instant and actionable QoE metrics for every device covered by Primetime For the unied solution, Conviva and Adobe worked hand-in-hand to develop a pre-integrated pre-integrated set of libraries that work automatically with any Primetime supported device, device, protocol or system – be it Android, iOS, Flash or whatever comes next. As such, Conviva works out-of-the-box to give you comprehensive comprehensive QoE metrics on the more the 400 devices covered by Primetime.

Compare and contrast performance across devices, platforms and systems While Conviva’s code extracts information from each stream and device on a granular level, the “From day one,

data is normalized before being transmitted back to the Conviva platform. With Conviva,

Conviva’s mandate has been to provide the

you can condently compare and contrast and benchmark QoE metrics across devices, systems and platforms, for a truer gauge of volume and business

best experience possible

performance than otherwise possible.

for our OTT service providers. Complementing Adobe Primetime’s goal of providing the best solution

Expedite “time-to-market”

for end-to-end services, Conviva together with Adobe helps our mutual service providers dominate the market by deploying optimized OTT solutions with greater agility and a wider device reach.”

Even with a developer-friendly SDK, the development cycle for new device coverage could take a development team 6-8 weeks to complete. The Conviva pre-integrated package for Primetime comes out of the box ready for testing, eliminating the need for development, and can be ready for production in typically

Dr. Hui Zhang, Founder and Chief Executive Ocer Conviva

one week or less, once testing is complete.

 

®

Sony  Crackle: leveraging the Adobe-Conviva partnership to deliver a better viewing experience across all screens Challenge

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Crackle had added an array of new, quality programming oerings oerings but deliverability issues were limiting full viewer engagement.

Solution The combination of Primetime and Conviva gives Crackle unparalleled control over the viewing experience. Primetime allows Crackle to deliver and manage content across more than 400 devices. With Conviva, Crackle can monitor the quality of each stream and correlate engagement with experience.

Results With the unied Primetime-Conviva Primetime-Conviva solution, Crackle was able to increase quality and user engagement and get the correlated experience and audience metrics it needed to make more informed editorial and marketing decisions.  

82% improvement in buering ratio

 

50% increase in average bitrate

 

2-8 minute increase in time watched per viewer

▪

▪

▪

“It’s imperative for us to understand our audience’s behavior and ensure their experience is of the highest quality. As such, Crackle relies on Conviva [and Adobe] to provide data on and to optimize the quality of that viewer experience and ensure continued engagement with our content.”

Daniel Sanders VP Technology, Chief Software Architect Sony Crackle

 

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Adobe Primetime and Conviva allow OTT providers to deliver the video quality customers now demand As IP-delivered video continues to take screen time away from conventional TV, viewers will increasingly expect and demand better quality from their OTT providers. Adobe Primetime has clearly separated itself from other OTT platforms with its breadth of device coverage and range of complementary capabilities. By partnering with Conviva, Adobe can now give OTT providers a way to close the gap between what is possible and what can be delivered on a unied platform.

“Adobe Primetime has always valued Conviva for bringing quality of experience front1

Nielsen, Total Audience Report (2015)

2

US Statistical Abstract , 1980

3

User Survey Analysis: Gartner

Consumer Insights — People at Work and Play in 2014

and-center when delivering OTT services. With this partnership, both Adobe and Conviva can serve our joint customers better by bringing their service to market faster while maximizing quality and engagement.”

4

eMarketer (2015)

5

Accenture, Digital Video and the

Connected Consumer 

Campbell Foster Director of Product Marketing Adobe Primetime

Silicon Valley +1 (650) 401-8282

# EXPERIENCE EXCELLENCE © 2015 by Conviva. All rights reserved. www.conviv a.com

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