“We are at a point now where all of the major TV companies have launched their own apps. So there’s been a lot of flux in the marketplace and the apps have all been growing pretty rapidly, says Nick Cicero, Vice President of Strategy at Conviva, explaining the rationale behind his company’s new State of Streaming: Content Discovery 2021 report.  “But we seem to have reached a plateau in terms of rapid growth, and when we talk to our customers, it seems they’re all trying  to figure out what comes next. Specifically, they are looking at what is going to help them attract new customers and retain the ones they have over a long period of time. They’re looking at how to optimize user experience overall and discovery in particular on their interface.”

ALAN WOLK (AW): What were some of the insights you were looking for from the Content Discovery report?

NICK CICERO (NC): Top of the list was understanding the value of personalization and recommendation. One of the key findings from the report was that you really have to spark serendipity for your customers, in terms of content discovery. We found that people were discovering new content by browsing or just by logging in or having the streaming service recommend something to them.

That speaks to a lot of the challenges that people face around knowing what service to go to in the first place, and then, if they're searching for a particular show on a particular service, actually being able to easily find that show on the app.

So taking that survey data, we want clients to be able to leverage our streaming data to understand what are the types of content that certain segments of viewers are watching? And then they can figure out how do you use that data to better promote and surface recommendations for other consumers in order to personalize their experience.

AW: So how does that actually play out, what sorts of actions should a streaming service be looking at?

NC: At a macro level, it means having a high level understanding of the way your app is designed and how that impacts consumption. So you might look at things like your promotions or the marketing campaigns that you're running, and start there in order to understand “are these the right types of content I should be promoting?” 

You’ll want to look at things like “Which features of my service do consumers seem to like best? What genres are they most interested in? And how do I use that data for everything from creating playlists to  the hierarchy of my home page  to recommendations?”

AW: How does Conviva data come into play in all this?

NC: Our clients can take our Conviva data and then do something like look at new viewers who have come in over the last 30 days and determine which areas of the app people watching the highest number of different shows on, which sections they’re doing the most binging on, which sections they are spending the most total viewing time on. 

Then they can take those insights and build them into their product, everything from how they compile their content carousels and recommendation carousels, to the overall layout of the app. 

To give a concrete example, we have customers who are looking at “featured” carousels, and they're saying, “when we put this type of content in this premier carousel, it drove this many more viewers than when we put this other piece of content in there.”

They can even go more granular and look at all those factors through the lens of new viewers, uncovering insights like “when we added this title to the feature carousel, people skipped over that carousel and ended up going deeper into our catalog, whereas when we put our hits up, people just went right into the hits.”

So you can use those insights to determine the right ways to promote various types of content within your app. Or you can take the data and use it to personalize how you build your content and recommendation carousels so that new viewers who are less familiar with the site see something different than long-time viewers.

AW: How is Conviva collecting data? How frequently are you measuring viewing?

NC: Conviva is really a continuous measurement platform. We provide census level second-by-second streaming data.  We're not sampling any of this. It's not coming in spurts. It's actually integrated at the player level. So you literally get every single second of every session of every viewer who is on your platform. We're tracking every second of what they're playing on every bit of content within your apps or websites across different devices. Then we bring all that data into one place where you can then recreate core consumption and engagement metrics, things like plays and minutes consumed and completion rates, and what shows are people watching and when are they watching them. Then you can combine all of that with your metadata to filter the traffic and see what people are watching. 

We also have the ability to go much deeper and build audience segments in real time. So not only is Conviva able to capture all of the streaming data, we're also able to build audience segments for you and then group all those different audience segments into buckets. 

Let's say I want to look at new viewers who I acquired from Facebook or new viewers that I might have acquired with a big ad campaign, or new viewers that came in and watched a piece of sports related content as their first piece of content. Conviva has the ability to track them at the session level, which means our data is about as granular as you can get, because we're capturing every single second of consumption across all of the different devices. 

So you can do all that, and because Conviva’s sensor is embedded in every single app you distribute regardless of device, you get a broader range of measurement than if you were just looking at TV and you can then also use that data to fine-tune your app on each different device. The possibilities are really endless.

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