With the highest mobile data usage per smartphone in the world, India is seeing a surge in data-intensive content such as video. Affordable high-speed mobile internet connectivity and increased smartphone adoption has fueled the adoption of video and OTT TV services in India, and boosted sports entertainment viewership on digital platforms. Waiting to watch a sports broadcast on television is quickly becoming passé, as more and more sports fans are flocking to digital platforms to access this content. 

Deliver the desired fan experience

Today’s sports lovers dream of having a true on-field experience, and Dream11 , India’s biggest sports gaming platform (with 70 million users), is making that dream a reality. The company offers Indian sports fans a platform to showcase their sports knowledge while playing fantasy cricket, football, kabaddi, basketball, and hockey.

In early 2019, Dream11 launched FanCode , an ad-free multi-sport aggregator platform, offering a mix of content, commerce, and community engagement. FanCode provides live match scores, research-based insights, fantasy sports statistics, expert fantasy tips, game analysis, and most recently, live videos. The app also allows users to engage with other sports fans in real time. To date, the app has generated over 10 million downloads on the Apple store and Google Play store.

The video advantage

What does it take to deliver a highly engaging user experience? Video. In the case of FanCode, this means live-streamed content and on-demand videos powered by the Brightcove video platform . Adding video into the mix is a game-changer for FanCode, enabling their user base to experience a high-quality streaming experience across all devices. The multi-sports aggregator platform has forged partnerships with some of the world’s biggest sporting leagues, such as the International Champions Cup and European Cricket League , to stream exclusive digital content in India. 

In today’s fast-moving sports landscape, not all content owners need to possess a deep level of technical expertise to run a successful OTT business. These providers can focus on their content, fan engagement, and business models—while leaving the underlying video streaming technology to the experts. Enabling customers like FanCode to provide millions of sports fans with their own virtual teams at their fingertips? Now that’s an achievement that the Brightcove team is proud to stand by.

Are you ready to harness the power of sports video? Download our whitepaper —and speak to our video experts to learn how to tap into the direct-to-consumer sports experience, increase reach, and enhance fan engagement.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Times are changing and this is good news. Barely 10 years ago, a notion that we’d be collectively working hard as an industry to deliver a KPI-defined quality of experience (QoE) would have been laughable. With service providers struggling to generate revenue from online offerings, there was a never publicly exposed view that OTT services were very much a best-efforts value add. Any thoughts of spending significant dollars on monitoring and development time purely to shave fractions of seconds off content delivery times would have evaporated like remnants in the bottom of a bottle of scotch. 

Today, the world of QoE is becoming huge business, and with service providers now generating significant sums from these services, the pressure to deliver five-star experiences to our now paying (often double digits!) consumers is high. 

When we think about measurements of not just a live sports event—but any deliverable—what are the first things to come to mind? Audience numbers? Average video bitrate? Unique viewer minutes? Most probably all of the above. More importantly, what are the things that don’t come to mind? 

At Spicy Mango , our team has spent years building media technology solutions and consulting clients on everything from platform architecture to quality of service implementation. Here are a few of my tips on measuring the success of your content.

Data is key

Data is (or should be!) a key pillar in helping us ensure that our service meets increasingly demanding consumer expectations. If as technologists we’re doing our jobs in the right way, we use this data to iteratively feed back into the product and platform to ensure that what we deliver is always a better experience than the last. But as an industry, there is no denying that we’re still hugely focused on the video playback experience. The notion of how we measure and monitor the entire consumer journey from end to end, is often spared little thought. 

Peak considerations

In traditional video on demand (VOD) services, we experience what we know as peak viewing periods, which are usually between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. This broad window of time results in the traffic we receive to control plane services such as authentication, catalogue, location services, and entitlements, being generally evenly distributed with a consistent and steady stream of activity. After all, our VOD assets have no fixed start time or end time, so there’s no drive for everyone to view concurrently at any one moment in time. 

In a live sports environment, the polar opposite applies. As consumers rush to access the service in those few moments before the start of the live event, our peak viewing period of hours is compressed to a window of activity of only a few minutes. Requests to key platform functions like authentication, purchase flows, and entitlements all surge, resulting in what we refer to as peak concurrency. 

Over the last two years, there have been a number of significant outages in the OTT platforms of major brands worldwide. Surprisingly, it’s not the video delivery services that have been to blame, but failures at the control plane. Our favorite CDN providers do not (and should not) front the services that facilitate authentication or entitlements, meaning those huge traffic volumes are directed straight back to the core of the platform. We’ve been so focused on our video delivery metrics that little thought has been spared to how the other major building blocks in our services will hold up when traffic volumes peak.

Measuring success

So, now I think we’re getting close to being able to answer our key question. How do we monitor the success of our live sports event? We need to go back to the beginning of our consumer journey. If our users are unable to log in or pass a simple entitlements check (either at all or within seconds), they have little hope of making it as far as access to the products we’re fundamentally selling—the video assets themselves. 

The widespread adoption of the term “microservices” is something worth taking note of —and within circles of global video enterprise architecture, has been something of a mantra for a long time. The notion of smaller groups of functionality and capabilities that are loosely coupled, grants us the ability to monitor, analyze, and as a result, scale different subsystems at different rates as traffic volumes vary. Our approach to how we monitor key functionalities in our services—including those provided by third-party SaaS and PaaS suppliers present in our architectures—is key to how we scale to ensure the level of quality of the whole experience our consumers expect. Do not be fooled into thinking that your third party has this covered—take responsibility for holding them to account—ensuring response times and interactions behave exactly as they should.

Breaking down our monitoring to unique groups of functionality will help greatly here. Dashboards and reports that trend user activity with authentication, catalogue, entitlement, DRM, and other systems will quickly and easily identify hot spot areas of traffic—identifying where additional capacity should be added, or changes to the architecture need to be invoked to bring optimizations. 

Measuring how successful our live sporting events are requires a holistic but granular approach to monitoring. It means an end to business reports and statistics that focus solely on video views and average bit rates—and an introduction of metrics that chart every single element of the end-to-end journey of the consumer. From application load time, to login, to catalogue load and rendering, to player page launch, and more—right until the last frames of video are displayed.

When compared to traditional viewing volumes of our cable and satellite counterparts, OTT delivery still supports fractional numbers. There is no doubt that Internet delivery should be viewed as a viable long-term replacement, but the strengthening of core components in our platforms to support these vast levels of scale and performance is undoubtedly the key for success. 

Interested in learning more? Catch my entire presentation on live sports on demand at REPLAY .

To view our Partner blog, click here

When your workforce is spread across the globe, whether in regional offices or remote home offices, building a cohesive company culture is a challenge. Because we’re a video company at heart, we rely on internal video communications to build up our culture and unite our global workforce, and we’ve found that it works pretty well. The key is personality. On two recent occasions, we had the opportunity to revitalize a couple of ongoing internal video programs, so they aligned more closely with our personality. Here’s how we did it.

C suite communications

Internal videos, particularly those involving company leadership, can be challenging for creative teams. Generally, there’s a tight lid on messages coming from the C suite, and the first impulse is to produce a tightly scripted video so the outcome is guaranteed from the start. The problem with that approach is that it ends up feeling robotic, the message doesn’t come across as friendly or warm, and natural personality is lost.

We wanted our update videos to show who Brightcove CEO Jeff Ray really is—a fun-loving, approachable leader who’s passionate about video—so that our entire global workforce feels like they know him no matter where they’re logging in from. Producer Jason Oliveira pitched a genius concept—create a “video podcast” style set, ditch the script in favor of bullet points, and let an organic conversation unfold in front of the camera. Check out the video at the top of this blog post for a behind-the-scenes look at how we did it.

It took some trust, but our first video in this style managed to inform the company of important midsummer updates while still feeling warm and conversational—and it’s much more engaging to watch than a stiff talking-head video. Jeff and his guests, Chief Revenue Officer Rick Hanson and VP of Design Carolyn Pampino, really brought it in terms of personality.

Internal events

We’ve live streamed our annual ping pong tournament in past years in an effort to help our regional and remote teams feel like they’re part of the event. It’s one of Brightcove’s big summer traditions, and we want to include our entire global workforce! This summer, we took the opportunity to build on that foundation and add some personality (there’s that word again). Like a lot of tech companies, the ping pong table at Boston HQ is a central gathering place, and the annual tournament is a tightly contested battle. We wanted this year’s live stream to reflect the drama…and, let’s be honest, the inherent silliness and fun of ping pong.

For the final match of the tournament, we added color commentary and a graphics package to the stream to mimic a real live sporting event. We also trained a camera on the scoreboard for real time, picture-in-picture score updates and mic-ed up the table for crisp game audio. Because we knew the final product would be a great way to showcase our internal culture to an external audience, we decided to stream it live to Facebook using Brightcove’s Live to Social module. 

Within just a few hours, the social engagement and reach of this live event had already out-performed all the videos we’ve posted on Facebook over the last three months. Our conclusions are:

• Facebook is a great channel for behind-the-scenes and recruiting content—so consider repurposing your most fun internal comms content for Facebook.

• A little polish and personality, combined with strong visual elements and a sense of fun, boosts results for live events on Facebook.

In the end, this was a pretty low-lift, high-reward effort. We got to try something new, use the Brightcove Live solution and Live to Social, and create engaging content for social media on top of our regular internal audience.

Video is a special medium, because it can convey authenticity in a way that text and photos can’t. But you have to embrace the risk and uncertainty—otherwise your videos come off as “corporate trying to be authentic.” It’s not a good look. If you do embrace that risk, the reward of conveying your company’s personality is huge—it brings together your workforce in a way that email updates just can’t. 

Need to convince your boss that video is the future for internal communications? Here’s our guide to building a case for video comms.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Video is the leader when it comes to marketing content designed to drive business, increase awareness, and maximize ROI. Companies today realize the necessity of incorporating multiple types of business video into their content strategy—as well as the need to create more unique assets in order to rise above competitors. As such, marketing departments are challenged to come up with greater quantities of video while at the same time making sure that the content maintains the desired level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Video should rank highly on your content marketing checklist , so let’s look into one of the strongest forms of business video, content driven by subject matter experts (SMEs). 

Read on for a sneak peek into my recent presentation at Brightcove’s PLAY 2019 conference—and catch the entire session on demand at REPLAY .

Executing the perfect SME video

Self-serving talking head videos are not engaging—and can be quite cliché. These types of videos have given the term “thought leadership” a bad name, and typically lack any real value for the viewer. 

When creating SME videos, the focus should always be on your audience. How will they benefit from this knowledge? And how will this content help you establish their trust?

Overall, you should focus on these three primary goals:

• Create valuable, informative, and engaging content

• Make videos for each stage of the sales cycle (covered excellently in Brightcove’s Video Marketing Master Class )

• Develop content that can be easily scaled, repurposed, and remixed

[Image courtesy of Content Monsta]

“The Content Marketer’s Dilemma: Those that create content, don’t have the knowledge, those with the knowledge don’t create.” ~ A. Lee Judge

How do you get beyond the Content Marketer’s Knowledge Gap Dilemma?

In order to close the knowledge gap found when seeking to create quality video content, you must enlist both internal and external SMEs: 

• Internal experts have the unique knowledge that can only come from your company. These are your company leaders, product creators, service providers, and even sales team members. Sales leaders have rehearsed their pitch on your brand’s main differentiators. They’ve been reciting it over and over again, and are basically camera-ready.

• External experts lend authority and trustworthiness to your company. These are your industry analysts, partners, and customers. Companies often throw big events where they invite customers, partners, and other industry experts, along with salespeople and high-level executives. These moments are perfect for a video shoot because all of the individuals listed can provide information that your competitors will not have.

Creating base content with video

The next step is determining the base content capture format. Video provides the most fruitful type of content because by nature it consists of both visuals and text. Hence, video is where your true repurposing power lies. You can break a larger video asset down to create various types of content, such as:

•  Web page content

•  Articles

•  Podcasts

•  Infographics

•  FAQ videos

•  Behind-the-scenes videos

•  Shareable clips

How to get high-quality content from SMEs

At Content Monsta , an Atlanta-based marketing agency, our team has developed an offering that we simply call a Video Day. This is a video shoot in which we slot a time frame to interview multiple SMEs in a company within a given day. We’ve developed a strategy and structure that empowers us to generate a large amount of quality content beyond video. Some of the strategies we use to get the content we need include:

 Prepare open-ended questions

When you know that you are going to create written articles from an interview, you can ask questions that lend themselves to that type of content. For example, listicles are a successful article format, so instead of asking a thought leader about how great their product is, you would instead ask them to provide five reasons for why their product or service is better than their competitors.

If you’re interviewing salespeople, ask them to tell you about the most common objections they hear from customers. They will give you the information, but naturally add a positive spin in the end to explain how they respond to these objections.

Ask questions with sound bites in mind

Imagine the best possible quote you could take from a company CEO to post on Twitter or Facebook. What would it sound like? Use that as a point of reference to reverse engineer the interview, and ask the SME questions in long-form video content that you know you are going to be able to chop up into quotes or one-minute snippets down the line. These sound bites will be excellent for social posts.

Ask different thought leaders the same question

If you’re in a position to interview several people in different roles, ask them all the same question. That way, you’ll get different quotes and multiple options to choose from when you’re editing your video. Also, when repurposing this video into text, you will gain alternative ways to state your point. This will provide you with synonyms to your content keywords. More, but different, keywords will assist in your SEO efforts.

Always interview with a purpose: By asking the right questions, you can lay down the necessary foundation to get insightful answers for your video content.  So perhaps I should say, “interview with a re-purpose!”

Through a series of videos and content created from the video material, you can get subject matter experts to share valuable information and knowledge. The best thought leadership videos will deliver value to the target audience—while helping your company gain a competitive edge.

Catch my entire presentation on new approaches to content creation at REPLAY —where you can watch 55 sessions from Brightcove’s PLAY 2019 conference on demand.

To view our Partner blog, click here

In today’s streaming landscape, content owners around the world must determine how to deliver high-quality content quickly and securely—while also providing an affordable and scalable multi-platform offering. During our recent interview-style webinar , streaming media expert Dan Rayburn provided his data-driven insights on how to optimize your user experience and maximize your video ROI. 

Didn’t have a chance to tune in? Read on for an overview of what we discussed—and watch the on-demand recording for more information.

Survey says…

During the webinar, Dan highlighted some key findings from a recent survey he conducted amongst 128 respondents across the US streaming media industry:

Measuring success

Seventy-two percent of respondents reported that “cost analysis data” is the metric that matters most to them when measuring the success of their live stream.

As Dan highlighted, this finding accurately reflects what we’re hearing from a lot of customers in the space. People throughout the industry are still looking for ways to monetize their content—and plenty of customers are willing to pay a higher cost for better quality. The question becomes: “How do I measure, as a customer, the success of live streaming?”

Customization features

Sixty-eight percent claimed that “improved user experience with faster startup times and less buffering” was one of the two most important customization features when it comes to the delivery of their video.

These results highlight that today’s content owners don’t see cost as the only factor to consider; they want to provide a good user experience. As Dan called out, this improved experience will hopefully translate to better engagement, higher revenue for those that use the VOD model, and lower churn for those that leverage the subscription model.

Adding live streaming to VOD delivery

Fifty-three percent of respondents aren’t currently adding live streaming to their video-on-demand delivery because they “don’t have content that is time sensitive.”

As Dan pointed out, not everything has to be live: “This is about using the best technology for the best use case and for the right application.” And there’s definitely the potential for simulated live content here—which is something we’ve had in the industry for awhile. We’ve seen this more as people are packaging content into playlists and creating personalized, linear channels. As a best practice, start with one live event and see how the technology works for you.

Playback platforms

When asked which playback platforms are most important to them, 94% selected mobile, while only 41% selected Smart TVs.

This finding comes down to monetization: “Connected TV advertising is only just now coming to the market,” explained Dan. If there’s no good way to monetize on a platform, content owners aren’t going to use it. Thankfully, the industry is coming together to create some standards and build a good ad experience. In fact, we predict that this Smart TV stat will jump over time. According to Dan, if we do this survey again next year, this figure could potentially be in the 55% to 60% range.

Improving service

When asked to choose the three most important things a video platform provider can do to improve their service, the top selections were:

• Better business terms/contract flexibility (56%)

• Provide solutions that help increase the ROI of delivering my video content (43%)

• Take the time to understand my business (25%)

As Dan called out, today’s customers aren’t necessarily calling for a lower price, but a fair and flexible one. And it’s important to remember that they “measure ROI very differently—depending on their business model. They need better ways to understand what the impact of video is on their business.”

Overall, Dan’s survey results highlighted that today’s viewers seek a high-quality, fast, and secure multi-platform experience from an affordable, scalable, and reliable provider.

Why you need a multi-CDN strategy

In a world where content delivery can be expensive and complex, how you can provide the desired user experience outlined above—while maintaining your profitability? Adopt a multi-CDN strategy.

CDNs play an important role in determining your audience reach, delivering your content, and scaling your offerings. As Dan called out, certain CDNs are better than others—and some options focus on certain types of content delivery in specific verticals, markets, and regions.

By implementing a multi-CDN strategy, you can spread your traffic across multiple CDNs to compare cost and quality, explained Dan. Doing so empowers you to maximize your ROI—and increase your flexibility and redundancy, as you can easily switch from one CDN to another. In addition, you can deliver the best blended experience to your end users.

And a multi-CDN strategy isn’t just for large customers anymore, according to Dan. Today, medium-sized and small providers can use platforms like Brightcove to decide where the traffic should go based on performance (so you don’t have to figure that out yourself!) In fact, here at Brightcove we support Delivery Rules that empower customers like Seven West Media to deliver their content in an efficient, cost-effective way.

The key finding from my conversation with Dan ? Overall, it’s important to understand how and when your customers want to consume your content so that you can deliver the best user experience—while still being able to maintain a profitable business model. “Do the basic business economics math to make sure that you have a way to monetize your content,” said Dan. “That’s the most important thing.”

To view our Partner blog, click here

It’s almost the most wonderful time of the year (or at least the summer)! The 31st annual Shark Week starts on Sunday and it’s shaping up to be finomenal. This highly anticipated series from the Discovery Channel always makes a splash—attracting millions of viewers with its jaw-dropping footage, research-driven programming, and celebrity content.

No matter your industry or target audience, you can learn a lot about launching a successful campaign from the pros at the Discovery Channel. After all, they’ve found the golden ticket to getting viewers to tune in for over three decades. Here are five of the top marketing lessons you can learn from Shark Week.

1. Build anticipation

Anticipation can be an extremely valuable tool as a marketer. As best-selling author Andrew Davis pointed out at our PLAY 2019 conference, audiences around the world have a need for closure—and you can keep them engaged by creating a “curiosity gap” that they seek to fill by viewing your content.

Though Shark Week doesn’t officially start until Sunday, the Discovery Channel began building anticipation around the event two months ago through a press release, social promotion, and more. A May 24th tweet announcing this year’s start date has since gained 4,338 likes and 2,005 retweets—including some of the below that were retweeted on the @SharkWeek handle, illustrating followers’ sheer excitement:

By building in two months to ramp up their promotions, the Discovery Channel gave themselves ample opportunity to expand their reach and capitalize on the social buzz surrounding Shark Week. As marketers, we should take note here. No matter what you’re promoting—from an upcoming event to a downloadable asset to a webinar—make sure you build in enough time to get your audience excited about your new offering. Consider doing the following:

• Write blog posts that give your audience a preview of the best practices you’ll be presenting during an upcoming event.

• Launch email campaigns that provide targets with a sneak peek into the research you’ll be sharing in your new whitepaper.

• Share a short webinar promo video on your social channels to capture your audience’s attention and encourage registration. 

2. Seek valuable partnerships

There’s no question that the Shark Week team understands the value of partnerships. From creating gear with Vineyard Vines to stuffed animal clothing with Build-A-Bear , they continually find unique ways to promote their content to new audiences. This year, Southwest Airlines even partnered with the Discovery Channel to create an augmented reality experience of swimming with sharks.

And let’s not forget their celebrity content. Over recent years, viewers have had the opportunity to watch everything from Olympian Michael Phelps going “fin-to-fin” with a CGI shark to Shaquille O’Neal having his first-ever shark encounter (which ended up being more of an attack!). By associating these top names with special programming, the Discovery Channel has been able to gather even more buzz and boost their viewership.

The overarching lesson here is simple: By establishing worthwhile partnerships—whether for promotional or content purposes—you can expand your reach. Of course, there are a lot of different paths you can take here. If it’s within your budget, consider sponsorship opportunities to boost your brand awareness. This can include anything from sponsoring an industry conference to a new research report that’s related to your field. If you have a corporate blog, you could also establish a partner post program in which an SME from each organization writes a relevant guest blog for the other’s publication—empowering both companies to reach a new market.

3. Captivate your audience with video

It’s no secret: Video is one of the most powerful mediums through which you can tell compelling stories. Of course, video is at the heart of the Shark Week content itself, but it also plays a major role in the Discovery Channel’s associated promotions. If you go to the Shark Week landing page , you’re surrounded by video—from the 2019 promo clip to various full episodes of content from previous years that you can watch for free. And on the @SharkWeek twitter handle, a large quantity of the posts include video content, whether they’re short clips or gifs—making it even easier to catch followers’ eyes as they’re scrolling through their newsfeed.

In today’s marketplace, this high use of promotional video content comes as no surprise. After all, according to our recent 2018 Video Marketing Survey , 53% of adults engage with a brand after watching video on social media—and 76% have made a purchase after viewing a video. By incorporating video into your marketing campaigns, you can show your products or services in action. Beyond general promo assets, consider creating interactive videos to boost your audience engagement, immersive video experiences to curate related content, and corporate gifs to breathe some new life into your social channels.

4. Amp up the drama

This year’s Shark Week promo materials feature a “So good you’ll scream” tagline—and a video that plays off the fear factor that drives so many viewers to tune in on an annual basis. The promo (as seen at the top of this landing page ) doesn’t even feature a shark, and instead focuses on how other underwater creatures may react to seeing one.

As the Discovery Channel exemplifies, you shouldn’t be afraid to have a little fun with your promotional content. No matter your audience or subject matter, there’s a way to add a little humor into your assets. This can be particularly valuable in videos, which are easily shareable through various platforms (and have the potential to go viral!). Just be sure to test different approaches to see which tone resonates best with your audience.

And think of how you can add a bit of drama, too. Even when there’s no underwater predator involved, there’s a way to up the ante a bit. Consider the knowledge gap you’re trying to fill with a particular offering and why your audience needs the information you’re providing to reach a certain goal, beat out their competitors, boost revenue, etc.—and call this out explicitly.

5. Consider going live

While this year’s Shark Week content will, of course, be available on the Discovery Channel, viewers will also be able to stream every program live on the Discovery GO app and Discovery.com. In the age of cord cutters where OTT is king, this distribution strategy empowers the Discovery Channel to increase their viewership.

While your brand may not have this type of long-form content to share, there are a variety of ways you can add live event streaming into your marketing mix. Consider live streaming scenes from an industry event, interviews with subject matter experts, or your team’s presentation on a hot topic. By doing so, you can expand your reach, enhance brand awareness, and create unique content that you can repurpose into video on demand (VOD) assets down the line.

Whether you’re looking to amp up your current promotional content or try a new outreach approach, there are a lot of marketing tips and tricks you can learn from Shark Week. But more generally speaking, the overall success of this Discovery Channel content tells one simple truth: Video is a powerful medium through which to tell your stories and engage with your audience. 

Interested in incorporating more video into your marketing toolbox? Learn how .

To view our Partner blog, click here