February 2, 2021
Data is your friend: Giving 24i’s customers insight into their streaming success
When we interviewed several of our customers for our recent whitepaper, “Tales from the OTT Frontline”, every one of them stressed the overwhelming importance of good analytics. Whether they’re measuring traffic to apps and services, monitoring app performance, or tracking user consumption trends, we’re constantly looking for new ways to help our customers get their hands on the metrics that matter to their business.
Gathering insights doesn’t have to be overcomplicated
In over a decade of building OTT video experiences, we’ve worked with a wide range of solutions - from standard web analytics tools that have been adapted to video streaming app use cases, to purpose-built video streaming analytics tools, and of course many general purpose tools for app and service logging and monitoring.
Each of these has its own advantages and limitations, but combining multiple solutions can add complexity to an already fairly complicated ecosystem. Specialist solutions can also be beyond the budget of smaller streaming services. At 24i, we always try to find solutions that reduce, rather than increase complexity. So, we’ve been working on a way to cover the basics of our customer’s operational needs, while eliminating the need to collate data from multiple tools. The obvious place to start was in Backstage.
Bringing analytics data into a familiar interface
As the whitepaper of streaming success stories makes clear, for our OTT customers, Backstage is their window into the world of streaming. It’s an application and content management system that gives service providers full control over all aspects of their video streaming applications from look and feel to content discovery and user segmentation. It’s also the hub that connects front-end OTT apps with third-party services.
Through the Backstage “Builder” screens, administrators can configure menus, change the content and layout of their video collections, determine a different user experience for different cohorts of viewers, and even update their entire branding, all at the touch of a few buttons and without writing a single line of code. They can also add or update metadata related to their EPG or VOD assets.
Something new for Backstage
Backstage now also includes our new dashboard panel that surfaces key metrics about service performance and quality to existing customers. Here’s a sneak peek at what they’re seeing:
The start of a big data journey
The rollout of the Dashboard feature is just the start of our plans for exposing the wealth of metrics gathered by our front end applications. This initial release is beta-testing metrics around catalog performance, viewership, and total playback figures.
In the future, we plan to include baseline metrics in the standard product, with more advanced metrics and features being made available through optional add-on components.
As we continue with this development, we’ll provide existing customers with early access to additional features, and get their feedback on priority needs in the product. We’ll be focusing on metrics that will help OTT services achieve their most pressing business objectives: to make the right decisions to maximize their content acquisition investments, optimize onboarding and payment flows, improve user engagement and reduce churn.
If you have any questions about the dashboard, please contact us.
You can also find more information on Backstage via our Smart Apps product page.
