Streaming video quality: Is more always better?
Introduction Online 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. Digital Media Performance Management
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PROBLEM To 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:
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Multi-bitrate streaming, which allows higher quality streaming video to play properly over Internet connections of varying connection speeds.
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HTTP-based streaming delivery (such as Microsoft Smooth Streaming), which enables adaptive streaming over the HTTP protocol.
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Higher bandwidth encoding. In order to offer viewers even higher quality video, many content owners are now encoding their videos at 750Kbps 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 EXISTS Two primary hurdles have prevented content creators from understanding the relationship between quality and engagement. has not been a solution that captures the • There user experience from within the video player itself. Instead, those interested in monitoring service quality have had to settle for network and serverside 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 has not been a way to combine and • There 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 PROBLEM Click here to download the full-length white paper, which includes: • • •
The solution to relating quality of service and viewer engagement data The business benefits and cost impact of optimizing QoS and engagement Color charts that illustrate the power of optimization in practice
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