Everything You Need to Know About Video Analytics

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    Imagine spending a great deal of time and effort creating a top-notch video campaign or building a robust solution and deploying it without any insight into its performance. That’s essentially sending your project out into the world blind. How do you tell if it’s actually working? It could be wasted effort if you just produced something your audience dislikes without realizing it (or just as bad, something that’s so blocked by lags and buffering that viewers abandon it out of frustration). Video analytics don’t just make your job easier here; they’re an integral part of creating any successful application.

    There’s no room for guesswork when it comes to growing your business with video. Audiences don’t exactly tell you why they stopped watching something — was it because they were bored? A technical issue? Another reason? The best way for you to understand how your mission-critical video applications connect with your audience is with the power of video analytics.

    Video analytics tools empower you to monitor your video pipeline in real-time. The more insight into both stream health and viewer demographics you have, the more informed you can adjust your business’s video strategy.

    You can use this guide to improve your understanding of video analytics, why they’re valuable, and how to get started using analytics in Wowza Video, Wowza Streaming Engine, and Wowza Flowplayer.

    What Are Video Analytics For?

    Video analytics encompass all data relevant to the video content you’re producing or deploying. Examples of particular metrics include:  

    • Your video platform’s technical performance and reliability (e.g., is your system scaling with viewership or overloading?) 
    • A stream’s delivery health (Are all data packages being transcoded and delivered in the proper order?) 
    • And end-user's viewing experience (are viewers watching a smooth video or encountering delays?) 
    • How viewers engage with content (clicks, total time viewed, drop-off points, etc.) 
    • What kind of people watch your videos (age and gender demographics, geographical distribution, etc.) 

    These insights can be as needed, such as with video on demand, or in real-time, which is critical for live streaming. For instance, a video analytics platform can notify you about poor stream health and help you identify the problem’s source to fix it before it impacts the viewer experience.  

    Ultimately, video analytics are about observability. Observability across your entire video workflow from encoding to playback grants you insight into what’s working and what’s not. This way, you know what to keep doing and what needs strategic adjusting.  

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    What Are the Benefits of Video Analytics?

    There are countless benefits to video analytics, but their ultimate value is in the information they provide you to make smarter, more strategic decisions. Video analytics grant you an overarching view of your streaming workflow and its performance out in the world: is your platform transrating streams properly so your viewers have a smooth experience regardless of internet quality? How are your live streams and videos on demand connecting with your audience so you know what to produce more of?  

    Whatever your goal is with video, analytics are crucial for actionable insights. Transparency enables you to manage every aspect of your streams more closely and do things such as:  

    Become more familiar with your audience: Where do your viewers live? What do they like? What do they dislike? You might even be reaching an audience you don’t intend to, so video analytics can help you shape your content to get back on-target. Plus, deeper audience insights allow you to make more personalized recommendations for further content to watch, encouraging continued viewing and customer loyalty. If your audience reacts well to something, you know what you’re doing right.  

    Minimize latency: Latency happens in streaming. Some platforms, like Wowza Video, promise sub-second latency — as close to real-time as it gets — but some kinds of misconfigurations or buffering algorithm issues can cause blockages in the workflow. Video analytics can inform you of where said blockages are occurring so you can address them immediately.  

    Optimize the viewer experience: Whether you’re streaming live on on-demand, you don’t have many chances to get it right because viewers will only tolerate interruptions or poor video quality for so long. Video analytics allow you to inspect, identify, and solve any technical issues that may be causing a less-than-ideal viewing experience.  

    Visualize data: Who doesn’t love data visualization? Video analytics tools can help you see increases and decreases in viewer traffic, engagement, data package delivery, and more in a digestible way.  

    What to Look For in a Video Analytics Platform 

    Aside from metrics themselves, you also want your video analytics platform to have an easily digestible and navigable UI. A platform that makes it simple to understand how your streams are performing technically and with your audience provides more actionable information than a platform that leaves you confused, even if the data is similar.  

    Something else to look out for is integrability into your existing tech stack. Is data portable the way you need it to be to create the video application your business wants? Don’t chose a platform that holds your data hostage — instead, opt for one that lets you import and export information into and from the tools of your choosing. 

    What Video Analytics Metrics Should You Measure?

    The best analytics tools will tell you similar information, but the one that’s right for your business might include metrics you’re particularly interested in measuring. That said, it’s important to cover the basics first, so the specific metrics any video analytics tool worth its salt will provide are:  

    Quality of Service (QoS): This data refers to how well your delivery infrastructure and network are performing. Examples of these include: 

    • Bitrate 
    • Throughput 
    • Latency 
    • Jitter 
    • Packet loss 
    • Network connection 

    Quality of Experience (QoE): This data encompasses how well your video platform is performing from encoding to playback. These data points include:  

    • Rebuffering ratio 
    • Average bitrate 
    • Playback stalling 
    • Playback failures 

    Engagement metrics: This data reveals how well your content itself performs (I.e., how your audience reacts to what you’re producing creatively more than a video’s technical delivery). A few examples are:  

    • Total views 
    • Peak views 
    • Concurrent viewers 
    • Unique viewers 
    • Repeat traffic 
    • Viewing time 
    • End user devices 
    • Geographic location 
    • Average time watched 
    • Total time watched 
    • Average engagement 

    Video Analytics Use Cases

    Besides particular metrics to track, you’re also likely asking yourself about particular industry use cases for video analytics. Which are the most pertinent ones for your goals, and some examples of how other businesses have leveraged them? Video analytics are useful for:  

    Media and Entertainment 

    In perhaps one of the more obvious examples, video analytics in the media and entertainment industry can help creators produce more successful content. If your audience positively engages with a specific video more than another, it’s a clear lesson what strikes a chord with them, so you know what to distribute more of (we’ll talk about the death of creativity another time). 

    Personalization 

    Personalization is becoming increasingly imperative in marketing. Customers don’t want generic messaging; they want user experiences catered to their individual needs and preferences. Using analytics from your video content or surveillance monitors can help you determine consumers’ behaviors in retail environments, entertainment venues, and other public spaces as well as online (such as eCommerce websites). For example, what kinds of people interact with your business the most (age, gender, etc.)? What can you infer about their emotions from their interactions (excited, uninterested, mildly intrigued)? Knowing more about your customers empowers you to create more nuanced recommendations and create more engaging experiences.  

    Monetization 

    Video analytics can also give you insight into your advertising strategy, not just your streams. Free ad-supported television (FAST) and advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) models are becoming increasingly popular as streaming platforms become more numerous and expensive, so optimizing how much revenue these models generate requires a robust suite of analytics that explain reach, clicks, and transactions.  

    Sports and Fitness 

    The sports industry has leveraged video for decades, using analytics to keep track of viewership, engagement, broadcast reliability, and more to provide real-time statistics and instant replays. However, the personal fitness industry is catching up as more and more trainers move to working online. Coaches and trainers in both verticals can leverage video analytics to analyze player or trainee performances, identify strengths and weaknesses, and create personalized and more effective training programs. 

    Monitoring and Controlling Traffic 

     Video analytics are instrumental in managing road traffic flow and ensuring safety. Analyzing video feeds from traffic cameras enables professionals to predict and direct congestion, accidents, and violations, as well as optimize traffic signal timers based on how many vehicles pass through intersections at specific moments. Plus, law enforcement can use video analytics to identify and track vehicles involved in criminal activities.  

    Content Protection and Copyright Infringement 

    Video analytics are vital to detecting and preventing unauthorized access to a live or VOD stream and content piracy. The online streaming platform market is saturated, which makes protecting copyrighted content particularly difficult yet important. Fortunately, video analytics can monitor streams to identify suspicious activities and detect prohibited instances of copying and sharing. Combined with robust security measures (like DRM) and AI algorithms, video analytics help content producers and distributors safeguard their intellectual property and prevent loss of revenue.  

    Education and Training 

    Video is an essential component of online learning platforms, so if you run or work for one, you can use your streaming provider’s analytics tools to glean valuable insights into student engagement and learning patterns. How much of each video do they watch, and for how long? If you’re streaming live, how many people are tuning in? This way, educators can identify improvement areas, personalize learning experiences, and track student progress. These tips also apply to corporate training sessions with employees.  

    Healthcare 

    Video is also becoming increasingly prevalent in the healthcare world. From telehealth appointments to surgical cameras and procedures streamed in real-time, video analytics can help physicians provide better care for their patients by monitoring their progress and ensuring that streams themselves are technically reliable and high-quality. 

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    Video Analytics Best Practices

    Having a quality video analytics platform is one thing — but what do you do with it? What are the possibilities of actions you can take with the information it provides? Knowing how to make the most of analytics is equally important as being able to read them. So, here are a few best practices that can steer your strategy in the right direction.  

    Keep Clear Goals and Objectives in Mind: Your overall video strategy should have a predetermined objective that you can use your analytics platform to measure your progress toward; otherwise, data is just noise. Clearly define your goals before getting started and identify which metrics are most important to achieve them. Are you trying to target an audience in a specific region? Geographic data is essential to pay attention to in that case. Are you trying to optimize your viewer experience for people in rural areas, further away from your content delivery network’s servers? Bitrate, network connection, and packet loss data will be insightful there. Focused efforts reap better results.  

    Integrate Your Platform With Other Systems: To maximize the value of video analytics, integrate your platform with other tools you use, such as your CRM system to gain a more comprehensive understanding of customer behavior. Plus, integration with your CMS or advertising solution could provide valuable insights for content optimization and monetization.  

    Differentiate Between Real-Time and Analytics for Later Viewing: Real-time analytics allow you to monitor video performance and audience engagement as it happens. You can leverage these real-time insights to make immediate adjustments to content delivery, address issues promptly, and otherwise optimize the viewer experience. Real-time analytics can also identify trends and patterns faster, enabling swift decision-making.  

    When your live streams are over, however, it’s advantageous to make them available on demand so viewers who couldn’t watch live can see them whenever they please. In this case, the video analytics you want to pay attention to most include metrics like times of day people watch, how often repeat views occur and from whom, your most popular pieces of content from your library, and other statistics that drive your on-demand strategy.  

    Analyze and Report Often: Measuring video analytics is an ongoing process. Don’t only pay attention on a stream-by-stream basis, starting from scratch each time. Regularly review data you collect from multiple streams and compare them to one another to identify trends and make data-driven decisions to improve performance. Don’t forget to leverage A/B experimentation to test various strategies for optimization, either.  

    Video Analytics for Wowza Video, Wowza Streaming Engine, and Wowza Flowplayer

    There are numerous video platforms on the market — all of which should include video analytics if they’re worth their salt — but Wowza is the most comprehensive and feature-rich solution on the market with on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid streaming options. With Wowza’s comprehensive video analytics, you enjoy unprecedented insight into and control over your streams with an end-to-end view of your stream health, viewership, and more.  

    For example, if you’re curious about your audience, you have data regarding how many viewers are tuning in to your content (and for how long), what geographic regions they’re watching from and on what devices, and what kinds of content they respond most too positively and negatively. If you need information about your performance metrics — both live and on-demand — the Wowza platform can tell you how effectively your stream met your audience’s demand, the average bitrate for viewers (important for reaching people in rural areas as well as big cities), and how your content performed in different regions.  

    Want to dive deeper? You can check out the video analytics docs for Wowza Video, Wowza Streaming Engine, and Wowza Flowplayer