STREAMING MEDIA ANALYTICS

STREAMING MEDIA ANALYTICS

Content and Streaming Media Marketing Analytics and Video Streaming Content Marketing effectiveness

‘Remember, the most important part in Prescriptive Analytics is to ask even smarter questions, planning the next step, challenge the results and think further – always ask: “And Then What?”‘

Antal Sofalvy – CDO, Certified AI Coach, ML Trainer

Why marketing in streaming business is so important? You want to preserve what you have and attract additional audience from the market – even from the other guys… Marketing is your future – nurture it well and you’ll prosper.

OK, then let us pick three elements for the basics of streaming media analytics first – and we’ll discuss the rest in person I’m sure.

  • Automated Streaming Media Marketing Insights and Analytics
  • Advanced Content Analytics – Content engagement
  • Subscription Analytics: Subscriber journey, features, metrics and KPIs

Track, model and guide Subscriber journey, increase Subscriber Lifetime Value – an example

Just to demonstrate how brilliant an Advanced Analytical solution can be… on retaining subscribers for example.

Streaming Business Questions:

  • How subscription revenue can be distributed among content buckets (Show ROI)
  • What are the related content(s)? What shows consumed together?
  • Who is going to leave our service? (Churn prediction)

Ground 0:

  • Aggregate who watched which show for how long
  • Enlist neighbouring shows: “Association Rules” [If A and B then C]
  • Figure out who will leave: historical data analysis
  • What shows bring Subscribers – are there any “Exit” shows? (good for Customer journey model)
    • Property clustering accordingly (vs Time): First viewed / Last viewed / Middleware
    • What about free planners (same rule should be applied)?
    • Use watch time in model – should it be normalised then?

It looks simple however gather and cleanse your data usually challenging. Do not forget the Agile BI method and the Disposable Analytics – these help us to draw your success blueprint – fast! Of course there are Streaming Media Analytical related decisions: during the Advanced Analytical process you’ll need to introduce sensitive / situational / vogue rules, like:

  • What kind of watch-time do you want to consider in revenue distribution? How do you define / select “fully watched” content? Do you want to adjust this by show length?
  • Do we want to consider “Disguise” (disliked shows that were not watched fully), Skimmed content (watched just for a fraction of runtime)
  • Would you use the same weight for Heavy users / Not so heavy users (100 show vs 2 content pieces per month)?
  • What time-frame shall you use? It can be 30 days, but which dates (sync with Subs Period or behavioural milestones instead)?
  • ….

Related content, neighbouring content: shows consumed together / after one another

  • What level / granularity?
  • Does it change over time? [Yeah, you should normalize such Content “somehow”! ;-)]
  • How to represent or even incorporate the results into your analytical food chain?

Granularity

  • User (ID) / User clusters / Unique users
  • Content / Episode / Series / Show level and clusters
  • Watched? (fully / partial / sampled): introduce normalised metric: % of full show runtime watched
  • Skipped / Skimmed: Started not to watch certain content
  • User addiction level / patterns in usage
  • Add additional layers your marketing staff can utilize easily

Content Streaming Media Marketing Analytics

Streaming Media Content Analytics – An Agile Prescriptive model

Goal: extend total subscription time; foster to renew subscriptions, increase Lifetime Value and make The Return easier

Secondary: identify content marketing patterns (recommend additional content + timing of this)

How:

  • Track user’s content journey and intervene when potential success patterns break
  • Identify standard and non-standard usage patterns (multiple unfinished content pieces then radio silence, for example)
  • Guide your Subscribers through your optimized product journey

Why subscribers leave?

  • Consumed all interesting content (content journey comes to an end)
  • Content became irrelevant (ageing)
  • Users can not find the content they want / you want them to find / they should find – lack of serendipity
  • Cancelling shows
  • Price
  • Competition
  • Technical difficulties
  • Financial decision
  • Paused subscription (chance to renew)
  • End of Free Trial
  • …and a handful of other features our video streaming marketing analytics reveals.

In real life all mixed up, usually no dedicated flag to identify which happened… On the other hand we can generate some clues. Pretty good ones, actually… Let us concentrate to the first two content journey related stuff now.

 

Streaming Media Analytics Example – Hypothesis

Subscriber leaves after a certain chain of content consumption so consumption behaviour can predict churn

Here come some Data Science related questions (features to introduce):

Who is in scope? (which users / observations will be used for mining)?

  • Clustering: frequency of consumption
  • Clustering: number of incomplete video views
  • Above Cluster changes in time (significant or not?)
  • Full video views vs non complete ones – how they define completed view? What is the length of a property vs full view (5-8sec skipping vs 24:35 out of 25 minutes)
  • Will a typical number of incomplete views metric predict churn (?) from above – raises the importance of Normalisation (75 out of 200 vs 150 of 5000)
  • Association Rule vs Sequence Mining (order is important or not?)
  • Collaborative filtering to add serendipity (if applicable)
  • Reduce Association rule granularity: introduce / create meaningful sub groups of content (great clustering case or even classification works) even on Content level (but determine age group demography / gender & co)

Features to track:

  • Typical successful video usage patterns (video views / content journey of churners / non-churners)
  • Create such clusters and generate typical KPIs
  • Track current measures against these
  • Consider Streaming Video quality and features (dubbing, release strategy, resolution) and even market activities

Challenges:

  • Has the account been used by one person? (according to research: 60+% shares account; 40% uses other’s credentials; 25% family + 15% outside home, etc)
  • Everything changes in time – so you need to analyse time chunks (optimized analytical windows)
  • BTW “Time”: consider local time-zones and implement analytics accordingly
  • Consistent content consumption patterns
  • Consistent churn flagging (lot of parameters can be considered)
  • How to handle different Streaming Metrics? (Video Views, Video Starts, Video Completed, Watch Time, Total Time, Markers, etc)?
  • Country/Region/Device/Platform version (any pattern differences?)
  • Connected views (started day1, completed day3) – are these marginal?
  • Behavioural glitches (holiday, sickness, mood, etc)
  • New content
  • Competitor’s offer and other streaming market disturbances
  • … and another 100+ features D&A can help you to identify, optimise and utilise

 

Streaming Media Marketing Analytics and Content journey(s)

Parameters (enrichment, feature engineering):

  • What bought / consumed first, second, third, etc
  • Time between actions / products; time-frame of actions
  • Implement time-zone adjustments (use local time-zones not just the normalised time window)
  • Content features: Type, Genre, Season, Episode, Length, etc
  • Content type: meta-data driven categories (as determined above)
  • Consumption and usage patterns (repeat, new content); longitudinal features (lot over weekend, etc), periodicity, etc
  • Content library changes
  • How do you define “consumption”? Video views for how long? How do you optimise / find “right” length (have you seen all credits at the end, ever)?
  • [add yours]

 

Data Science: Association Rule Mining on the featured Media Streaming Dataset

Identify and map recurring patterns (Clustering + Collaborative filtering / Association Rule Mining)

Product / Content Bucket A -> Bucket B -> Bucket D, meanwhile in another constellation / usage pattern: Bucket B -> Bucket C –> Bucket E
This approach can identify which media content watched in common, which order, what are / can be the related contents … and so on. All in all pretty talkative approach. [Hint: if any of the identified trajectories missed, journey can be triggered back on track with proper marketing action]

Moreover this can elevate your Content Release Schedule Analytics and Optimization and this will even identify Exit points (last played shows and potentially typical behaviour patterns for your next analytics stage).


Streaming Media Prescriptive Analytics: If „chain” breaks, action can be taken immediately

  • Reminder with potential content fit – the “what” (Product Clustering), model even says the “when” [Semi-Prescriptive]
  • Validate with Churn Prediction (Time series analytics) and create synergy with direct marketing
  • Recommend relevant (= similar users’ consumption) content – even with offline recommendation engine
  • Measure, track and influence engagement in cohorts / clusters (oh, yes: feature engineering)

Of course it is just the tip of the Streaming Media Marketing Analytics Iceberg

There are a lot of Content and Marketing related questions D&A will help you to answer:

  • How to optimise and orchestrate video streaming marketing analytical efforts?
  • How to track marketing results effectively?
  • How to measure the impact of Streaming Media Analytics discussed briefly above?

Be advised, as soon as Streaming Marketing actions are taken – for example – based on Customer retention / Churn Prediction or other advanced analytics based predictions the analytical window parameters change, too (namely you recursively disturb the data space – false positive rate will decline…). Accordingly models partially need to be updated, actions, churn flags need tracking – yes, you are right it is a never ending story… an exiting one!

The good news is that this is not new for us at all, we know the data challenges and the best practices to deliver impactful insights quickly. Usually all Streaming data processing, data wrangling with Content and Streaming Media Advanced Analytics solutions can be scaled and automated for supporting effective and timely prescriptive marketing actions and create trusted intelligence.
At D&A we love to deliver such innovative solutions in Streaming Media Marketing Analytics.

Which Competitor of yours are doing all the above right? Want to be the First?

Do you have appetite to win your streaming market? Wanna innovate your business – now?

Data & Analytics Predictive Content Streaming Media Marketing Analysis Team 2016-2017.