39 ROUND TABLE Audience Engagement
THIS MONTH’S FEED ROUND TABLE GUESTS ARE:
IN THIS MONTH’S FEED ROUND TABLE, OUR PANELLISTS GIVE ADVICE TO A HYPOTHETICAL OTT START-UP, CALLED YOUPETS. THE FLEDGLING COMPANY WANTS TO KNOW HOW IT SHOULD USE TECHNOLOGY TO BUILD THE BEST POSSIBLE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT. WE’LL LET OUR FICTIONAL OTT CHANNEL TAKE IT AWAY:
MARKBLAIRBRIGHTCOVE Mark Blair is SVP of EMEA for Brightcove and serves as a member of the Brightcove executive team. He was previously VP of Brightcove’s APAC business, where he drove business growth with high-visibility wins in OTT services, as well as with leading brands and enterprises that use video for digital marketing and communications.
YOUPETS: Welcome! We are a new OTT video offering, called YouPets. YouPets has recently acquired a large library of content focused exclusively on – you guessed it – pets. Our library includes everything from features to documentaries to reality programming. We plan to be supported entirely by ads, primarily from the pet services and supplies industry. We have a few questions for you. First, our viewers are international and varied in their interests. How can we use technology to gather as much data as possible about this multifaceted audience? And what, in your experience, are the most important data points to know about an audience? MARK BLAIR: One of the models I like for these types of services is a free-freemium-paid curve. You provide a certain level of content access anonymously to give people a flavour of the service. With that you deliver advertising to defray some of the costs. The advertising on that side will be relatively low value because you can’t offer a great deal of granularity in the data. But then you can offer a step up from that and ask people to register. In return you offer an improved service, with advertising, and you can offer your advertisers a greater level of visibility to the segmentation of your audience. The next layer is using that better content to convert your viewers into paid subscribers, where you monetise directly.
JOHANNES JAUCH: Without a doubt, it is important to understand and know your audience prior to delivering any type of content. Knowing your audience means gathering general data on their age, gender, education level, language, culture and what social media groups they belong to. This is especially important when crafting an offer for a niche market. As a new OTT start-up, it’s crucial to get the start right. Quality of experience on a technical level is an enabler for everything else, and collecting data about it is not as easy as it may sound. Audiences are very sensitive to bad QoE. Making them wait too long, or exposing them to stream buffering, or – worse – failing to start when a user hits play are reliable ways of driving your subscribers off. Winning a viewer back is far harder than winning her for the first time. Collect data and create reports that can answer important questions around QoE and act upon them. Picking a software platform that already supports collecting such data in an out-of-the- box manner will facilitate managing continuous service improvement. Typically, such technology requires integration in players cross platform and is integrated with comprehensive logging and reporting services on the backend side. It’s probably not good enough to rely on reporting provided by a CDN, because it makes it harder to follow a multi-CDN strategy and renders consolidated reporting much harder, if not impossible.
RICHARDBRANDONEDGEWARE Richard Brandon is CMO of Edgeware. He specialises in bringing the company’s technology solutions to market by providing company strategy, technology positioning, go-to-market models and marketing.
JOHANNESJAUCHAXINOM Johannes Jauch is co-founder and CTO of Axinom Group. As the leader of the technology team, Jauch is responsible for defining the company’s ongoing path to technological innovation. Axinom serves global brands in the media and entertainment, telco and aerospace industries. The company’s platform enables customers to launch service scalable OTT offerings across devices.
ADAMNIGHTINGALEACCEDO Adam is SVP international at Accedo. He is responsible for sales &marketing, regional growth & development, delivery and profitability across all Accedo’s offices. Nightingale has previously held senior positions with Mobilitec (now part of Alcatel Lucent), CMG and Logica.
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