Today, TV has evolved from a world of limited options to one of almost unlimited choices. The future of TV is OTT and fundamentally, it will be defined by what the viewer wants, exerting a strong influence on how media companies package, deliver, and monetise their content. Across Asia, Brightcove has a regular dialogue with many content owners who are in various stages of their OTT journey. Launching an OTT TV service requires rethinking and orchestrating every aspect of running an online TV business.

Do OTT service providers understand their audience well enough to design an attractive and relevant value proposition?

To answer this, we teamed up with YouGov , an international data and analytics group, to poll 5,000 consumers in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The study investigated how these viewers typically consume TV, which platforms and devices they prefer, what factors motivate them to either sign up or unsubscribe, their payment preferences, and their tolerance for ads. The summary of some of the findings are:

• Thirty-five percent of viewers polled stated that they spend one to five hours per week watching content, while 21 percent stated they spend up to six to 10 hours per week.
• Mobile access is one of the key drivers for OTT TV sign-ups and retention for 27 percent of consumers, given the mobile centricity of Asia markets.
• Twenty-two percent of consumers stated they do not subscribe to OTT services because they simply do not have the time to watch.
• Twenty-eight percent said that the value proposition was simply not strong enough for them to subscribe, while 19 percent said that they were satisfied with existing payTV services as a reason for not subscribing.
• Once trial users convert to subscribers, four main factors play a role in their retention: accessibility on mobile, quality of experience on mobile, price, and content library.
• For those that stated that they do not have a current subscription and have never subscribed in the past, the value proposition has to be significantly compelling for these consumers to sign-up: the price point cannot be too expensive, and must be cheaper than existing pay TV services.
• Twenty-nine percent of viewers polled also stated that free online streaming sites were the preferred platform to watch movies. Movies are the anchor content of these sites.
• Asian consumers are happy to watch one to three ads. With OTT, the consumer general expectation is for more content and less ads, with 23 percent stating that they would rather pay a lower fee and watch some ads.

To read about the research results and what these mean for content owners, you can download the Asia OTT Television Research Report 2018.

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“Mo money. Mo problems.” Everyday, we enable live events and 24/7 linear channels for our global customers. We’ve learned a lot about what it means not only to deliver live at scale but to monetize live at scale. For Live, monetization is now an achievable and often necessary requirement, but success means thinking about the end-to-end workflow, from content origination to content consumption.

This post will focus on the use of advertising, the most common monetization approach for our customers. However, these best practices can still be useful in the context of transactional and subscription models.

People often use the umbrella term dynamic ad insertion (“DAI”) to describe the ability to present in-stream ads with video content. From a technical standpoint, DAI can be implemented by two different approaches: client-side ad insertion (“CSAI”) and server-side ad insertion (“SSAI”). It’s important to distinguish the between CSAI and SSAI to understand how monetization works best with live content.

CSAI is very common and the “de facto” standard for VOD. If we look at the workflow for CSAI:

• When an ad break is detected, the client device makes a request to the ad server
• The response may contain a waterfall comprising multiple ad requests
• The initial ad request may result in multiple ad wrappers, requiring additional redirect requests
• If those requests do not return an ad due to error (e.g., timeout, blank responses, HTTP errors) or unavailable fill, the initial ad request may fallback to the subsequent additional ad requests
• Assuming a successful response is provided to the client device, the assumption is that the ad creative is appropriate for the device and viewing experience
• And this gets repeated for every ad break – or even worse, multiple times within a single ad break. And for desktop, this assumes an ad blocker isn’t interfering with ad requests.

What happens is that ad requests – and all the subsequent ad wrapper or ad waterfall requests – require time. Latency increases, and the chance of an error or timeout for any step in that chain increases. The ad creative may not be available in a compatible format  (e.g., FLV on iOS). Even if the format is compatible, it may not be optimal:

• 4Mbps progressive MP4 sent to an iOS device accessing via 3G network
• Low resolution and low bitrate renditions sent to an in-home viewing experience on a connected television
• Or – what we call the “late night local used car dealer ad” – the volume of the ad is not normalized to the content

When any of these occur, the quality of the ad – and overall content – experience suffers, as does the value to the viewer, the content distributor, and the advertiser.

Optimize Live Monetization with Server Side Ad Insertion

SSAI handles the manipulation of live program content and targeted advertising behind the scenes. As a result, media companies can deliver live content to the viewer with the same seamless quality as traditional broadcast. The insertion of ads is frame accurate, the ad experience is the same quality as content, and since this approach doesn’t rely on sophisticated logic to manage client behavior using client-side SDKs, the live stream – content and ads – can be played on any device that supports the base format, often HLS or DASH.

The benefits of SSAI extend across the content ecosystem:

• For advertisers, SSAI can help us move past the archaic model of using “households” and “panels”. Instead, advertisers have the ability to target and deliver advertising to a specific user watching on a specific device in a specific geography at a specific time.
• For viewers, say goodbye to the “spinning wheel”; SSAI eliminates buffering between ads and content.
• For media companies, SSAI in the digital world of delivery and consumption opens up a viewing experience where advertising can be actionable, opening a bidirectional mode of communication that can increase the value to the advertiser and to the viewer.

Do the Math

One of the benefits of SSAI is the ability to support targeting per user, per session, and per ad break. This is a very powerful and valuable capability. No longer is measurement and attribution conducted at a household level. We can now target per viewer not just per DMA or RON. But this means those ad partners must have the capability to scale to hundreds of thousands of requests during an ad break.

To understand what this means from a systems perspective, let’s do some quick math for a live stream that reaches 1MM concurrent viewers (a common request from our customers) using HLS content encoded using six second segments

• Each user is treated as a unique session – 1MM sessions
• Each session requires a unique manifest – ~166K requests/second based on segment duration and typical refresh
• Each session requires a read and a write to maintain state – ~333K requests/second
• Each session triggers an independent ad request (which could result in additional request due to wrappers or fallbacks) – ~166K requests/second
• Each ad per ad break may have five tracking events (e.g., start, complete, firstQuartile, midpoint, thirdQuartile) – ~5MM impressions per ad

Depending on Partners Means Dependable – Scalable – Partners

If we look more closely at the last point, for a 120 second ad break, if the ad server responds with four 30 second ads for every request, that ad break results in ~20MM impressions in that span of 30 seconds. But if the ad server responds with eight 15 second ads for every request, it’s now ~40MM impressions in that span of 30 seconds.

Monetization requires close coordination with ad partners. And just as public cloud infrastructure is not created equally across the globe, your ad partners are likely utilizing similar infrastructure and need to analyze their regional capabilities.

During a high profile sports events, a customer reported lower than expected ad fill. To diagnose the issue post-event, this required aggregating and correlating multiple sets of data, matching time zones, session information, and eliminating “natural” or expected errors. We looked at

• The ingestion of the input contribution feed that might have caused drift or errors
• The in-band signals to ensure the ad breaks were properly marked and triggered the ad requests
• The session information to ensure there was no data loss with the in-memory cache layer
• Client-side player logs to validate if there were playback errors
• Ad requests to determine if the ad server was returning successful responses or errors

All the data seemed within reasonable ranges, but we eventually discovered that the 3rd parties receiving the ad beacons were unable to handle the spike in impressions, resulting in timeouts or errors due to the volume of legitimate requests made in the short amounts of time.

As a result, this means thinking about how to distribute both ad requests and beacons to lower the peak throughput while delivering the effective number of requests without compromising timing.  As a result, we’ve learned that we need to tune our systems to “scale down” to the capabilities of the customers’ ad partners. This means evaluating the approaches for both pre-fetching ads (i.e., making ad requests before an explicit known ad break) and distributing impressions over a longer timeframe to reduce the peak throughput.

Constantly Re-Evaluate Your Core Infrastructure

We are proponents of public cloud infrastructure; it has been a cost-effective and time-efficient method to enable a global architecture while maintaining regional optimization. However, the challenge is that not all public cloud infrastructure regions are equal in performance and cost. As a result, you need to balance the compute, storage, and delivery capabilities of a region with demand, and you may need to overflow to other regions to maximize performance or minimize cost.

As we utilize CDNs as a critical part of our workflow to enable global delivery of content and ads, we need to keep an eye on our CDN partners to ensure they are performing consistently at scale. For both everyday operational measurement and post-event troubleshooting, significant effort is focused on identifying and monitoring those situations that were formerly edge cases but are now commonplace situations to determine if there are issues specific not only to a specific CDN partner but to CDN POPs, subnets, and even individual edge servers.

We’re excited to see live streaming continue to play a significant role in how companies grow revenue, increase engagement, and build audience.

Broadcast is dead. Long live the “new” digital broadcast.

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Wow. What a game. What an experience. What in the world happened?  

As my Boston Brightcove colleagues will attest, Super Bowl LII was a shocker and – for them – terrible, as it crushed their hopes of yet another Lombardi Trophy and stole from their fuel as contenders every year for another ring, another trophy. As sure as snow will settle on the Charles River in January, New Englanders see themselves ready to host another Super Bowl championship parade. Not this season though, as someone with a belly full of Geno’s Steaks sits atop a light pole in a Carson Wentz jersey, proud of his Eagles. Game aside, this year’s big contest will be notable for a number of things that didn’t meet the high bar of expectations. As the headline suggests, there were several events that led to a less than perfect experience in watching the game, both on broadcast and online.

First there was NBC’s 26-second broadcast outage. While it appeared to be costly in that there were commercials to be aired, NBC quickly explained that the outage was caused by equipment failure and that no game action or commercial time was missed.

Broadcast? Stream? Depends on How and Where You Are.

Super Bowl LII had an average online viewership of two million, a 15 percent gain over Fox a year ago. The stream was available on the NBC Sports app, NBCSports.com and the Yahoo Sports app, among others. The online audience peaked at 3.1 million concurrent streams. NBC offered its stream for free, keeping with tradition that their fellow broadcast networks have followed for the past several years. This year, the NFL Mobile app and Yahoo! Sports apps also carried the live stream. It is worth noting that this year, many more viewers also watched the big game on a variety of connected devices (Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, Playstation, and Xbox).   

The broadcast ratings, though fantastic by broadcast television standards, show a concern in viewing shift. Super Bowl broadcasts tend to pull in massive audiences. To wit, nine of the 10 most watched broadcasts in history are Super Bowl games, according to Nielsen data. Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks drew the largest audience ever, with 114.4 million viewers, according to NBC. This year’s game drew a 47.4 rating, which is down three percent year over year and likely to tally an overall audience near 110 million. That would make it the seventh most watched Super Bowl of all time. These numbers are still massive, despite the controversies and a slew of injuries to some of the league’s biggest stars.

As large as those ratings are, we’re not likely to be talking about them for very long. The 2018 Winter Olympics start this week in Pyeongchang, South Korea and I fully expect NBC’s streams to set records as the events play out. Fortunately for the folks at 30 Rock, the trophies for both events will live in the same case as both of these massive events are happening on their network and streams.

The Super Bowl is a broadcast ratings oasis, no matter the network holding the rights to the broadcast in any particular year. This is a welcome change from the regular season, which saw more declines in NFL viewership year over year. With changing consumption patterns and platforms for entire swaths of audience, streaming “is obviously a natural place to look to aggregate as as much audience as possible, because that is where more and more viewers are migrating to, with this whole idea of cord cutting,” Tuna Amobi, director and senior equity analyst at CFRA Research recently told USA Today.

Cord cutting used to be a softly spoken, ‘bad word’ in the broadcast and service provider space.  The phenomenon is better understood now though, where the aforementioned swaths of audience are net-new, but coming aboard on mobile-first means with their devices. The numbers show the impact to pay television too. Cord-cutting homes will grow to 18.9 million in 2021, according to eMarketer , and cord-never homes will hit 19.5 million.

Super Streams by the Numbers

In a trendline that any show or service would kill for, Super Bowl streaming viewership is expected to be up 45 percent over last year, according to a survey from digital agency Adtaxi. And, in another millennial trend to watch,the survey shows viewers aged 18 to 29 are the most likely (at 17 percent) to stream the game. It may take a day or so for those numbers to roll in, but I think the prediction is spot on. Historically, the Super Bowl stream audience numbers are quite the firework to watch, as they have climbed dramatically year over year.

In 2015, CBS’s live stream game drew an average of 1.4 million viewers per minute. In 2014, Fox Sports’ live streams attracted an average audience of 528,000 viewers per minute, an increase of four percent over the average audience of 508,000 that watched 2013’s game on CBSSports.com. Those numbers represent a 52 percent increase over the 346,000 that caught 2012’s competition on NBCSports.com. Fox also earned a Super Bowl record for online audience engagement, with users spending an average of 47.8 minutes watching the stream, compared to 38.1 minutes in 2013, and 37.4 minutes in 2012.

Need to Reach Massive Audiences?  Prepare to Build a Machine.  

If you’ve read many of my missives, you know one thing I say about streaming experiences is that the simulcast of their television origins must be ‘better than broadcast’. From Super Bowls to Summer & Winter Olympics, the organizations I’ve helped to design, deploy, and operate streaming workflows have done so with the vision that those streams are a brand extension that represent them just as their broadcast channel does in the traditional realm. Today, the line between the products has blurred or even vanished. These large events represent periodic status checks, where the ability to deliver massive audience and help monetize those streams is the minimum bar. For the Olympics, World Cup, and Super Bowl, system redundancy, geographic independence, multiple pathways, partners, and workflows are critical. Previous events in these categories have flourished and reached massive audiences. Make no mistake, they will continue to do so. There is no ‘missing’ technology nor component needed to successfully execute on these events. That said, this year’s game offered up some negative experiences that some will point at and remark that the industry ‘isn’t ready to support this.’ Don’t believe the hype.

For example, Hulu crashed near the end of game. Sony’s PS Vue service also reported downtime in some markets. What can we learn? As the paragraph above argues, planning, preparation and diligence will help you if you’ll commit to investing the time, effort and money needed to carry off live events large and small. Check out the webinar I did with Rob Hedrick from the NHRA on live event best practices. And this documentation should help serve anyone who uses our platform to deliver live events.

For those of us who didn’t have teams to passionately cheer for in the Super Bowl, August isn’t too far around the corner. For those of you who have live events, channels or other video requirements to meet – we’re here every day to help you.  

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In 2017, we saw households embracing OTT services more than ever, with 69 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribed to at least one OTT video service . More than 50 percent of those that use OTT services subscribe to multiple services, compared to 20 percent in 2014. With estimates putting it at a 150 billion dollar market by 2025, the OTT trend is not slowing anytime soon.

But with this growth comes competition and pressure on newer content owners to acquire and retain subscribers and compete with the big players like Netflix and Amazon for OTT market share. The good news is that you can apply a few fundamental marketing tactics, at a relatively low cost, to drive results.

Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll be covering a series of topics all under the umbrella of “Essential Marketing Tactics for Every OTT Service.” From today’s topic of search marketing to content and social media, we’ll provide tips, best practices and recommendations for additional resources to help you and your team succeed.

Search Marketing  

There are two pillars that fall under Search Marketing: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). 

SEO is used to organically increase visibility in search results of the major search engines. It requires an understanding of how search engines work and what people are searching for in terms of keywords and phrases, as well as the intent behind those searches. By understanding what keywords people are searching for, content on the site and any collateral being produced can be optimized. Incorporating these tags, words, and information into each part of the website helps it to become more discoverable by search engines. Another component of SEO is making sure your website is structured in a way that search engines understand.

With SEM, you can also purchase keywords through Google to ensure your site ranks at the top of the search results via a paid ad. This can be a helpful tool as SEO is ramping up. Establishing a history of traffic to your site is difficult, that’s why many opt to advertise to drive traffic in the beginning. Defining a pattern of traffic will help to render your Google ranking which will eventually help to funnel traffic to the site.

Getting started with Search Marketing can seem like a daunting task but it is a necessary one. Here are four easy steps to follow.

1. Determine the target keywords and phrases that best speak to the genre and theme of the service. Google Trends is a great starting point for this. It shows how people are searching for topics.
2. Set up Google AdWords by creating a free account at adwords.google.com , and evaluate search volume associated with the keywords and phrases selected to better prioritize.
3. Update existing content using these keywords and incorporate into new collateral when created. SEO requires ongoing management and includes other tactics like optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, header tags and more.
4. Invest in keywords through Google to ensure your site ranks at the top of the search results via a paid ad. This is a helpful tool as SEO is ramping up. Use your target keywords and create a campaign at adwords.google.com . Set up a daily budget and monitor the results and optimize in real time based on which ad groups are driving the strongest results.

Search Marketing can seem overwhelming, however, ensuring your service is visible in Google, either through paid or organic traffic, is critical. Once you have launched an OTT service, you want to make sure viewers can find it and subscribe.

Want to learn more? Here are a few guides we found helpful.

• The Complete Guide to SEO
• Beginners Guide to SEO

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Learn more about some of this month’s new updates from our product team that will help increase engagement for your video content. Here’s an overview of each of the updates highlighted in the video with links to more information and documentation to help you get started.

• Playlist players “up next” overlays .
• Brightcove Social now supports pushing captions in YouTube and Facebook .
• Brightcove Player embedding enhancements in the WordPress CMS connector.
• Improved cross-device functionality on OTT Flow, allowing viewers to pause on one device and start watching again on another.
• Beta program for the UI for Brightcove Live – contact your account manager to join.
• Migrate to Dynamic Delivery, learn more about it and why you should migrate here .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Getting your OTT service discovered by the right audience, at the right time, with the right content is critical to your success.

In the last installment of our OTT Marketing Essentials blog series, we provided recommendations to help ensure your service is visible within the major search engines, and we covered tips for getting started with paid search campaigns. This time around, we’re providing pointers and best practices for building your content repertoire and establishing a presence on social media.

Promotional Content

As with any launch, the first step should be to conduct an audit of your available assets to see what else needs to be created in order to engage with your target audiences. Assets can be trailers, images, content reviews, behind the scenes footage, roundtable discussions, and influencers providing testimonials of the service. Mix it up a bit; don’t promote only video. Utilize text whenever possible to create a good balance for viewers.

When starting the content audit, the question to ask yourself is, “What content do I have to promote the service?” Filling in the gaps to create engaging, thought provoking content will help create an attractive experience to keep viewers coming back for more.

Blogs

Creating a blog is a great place to house your content. Establishing a regular cadence will help drive more organic traffic and engage existing audiences. Start by building out a blog calendar, laying out the topics and themes that interest your viewers. When writing these blogs, naturally incorporate keywords and phrases identified via Google AdWords .

Remember, producing high-quality posts is more important than quantity. Some ideas for blog content include program reviews, sneak previews of upcoming programs, and behind the scenes information and interviews. Be sure to include a call to action to guide viewers to the next step, whether it’s a subscription offer, a free trial, or a preview of the newest content.

Social Media

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are playing an increasing role in building audiences and driving conversations for major media brands. These networks can also be very valuable for smaller content owners in helping drive awareness and conversion.

Social platforms provide an excellent testing ground to see what type of offers and content will resonate most with your audience. Once you see what resonates best on your own organic platforms, you can elect to explore paid promotions on the channels. All of the major platforms offer self service, pay-for-click campaigns that require just a credit card to launch. Additionally, all of the major social networks offer advanced targeting options, which allows you to reach your desired audience with specific messaging.

Facebook

With more than one billion active users around the world, Facebook is where you’ll find the largest audience. Setting up a Facebook page for a business is easy and allows you to connect with fans and subscribers. When posting to Facebook, include images and videos in each post—they draw viewers in and make for engaging content. Post trailers, clips, and interviews regularly on this platform.

Instagram

Instagram is a visual platform with over 800 million monthly active users worldwide. Creating engaging posts that utilize images and video is the first step. The second is finding and incorporating the right hashtags into your captions.This increases the likelihood of your posts being found by users. Once you have a few posts on the platform, start following people and grow your follower base. This can be done by finding services similar to yours, identifying their core influencers, and then following them too. You can also search relevant hashtags to see who’s posting about themes and topics relevant to your service. Establish a regular schedule and aim to post at least once a week.

Twitter

Building a Twitter community can be challenging and time consuming at first, but there are many benefits once you get into a rhythm. Growing your following takes time, but if you are sharing thoughtful, engaging content and using hashtags, your audience will find you. Ideally, Twitter is where you want to share any press coverage, press releases, new shows, trailers, and industry articles.

Like Facebook, Twitter allows you to interact directly with your audience on a more personal level. You can respond in real time to tweets and messages, and join conversations that are relevant to the topics your service covers.

Here are resources we found helpful for getting started and creating a strategy for each platform:

• Facebook: Facebook Marketing
• Instagram: Getting Started with Instagram Business
• Twitter: The Ultimate Guide to Twitter for Small Business in 2017

Measure

Acquiring more viewers is the objective of any OTT marketing campaign. It is critical to measure your campaign effectiveness and understand what content and channels are most effective. There are a number of analytics tools available to assist, including Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, both free services. Are your blog posts reaching a growing audience, or does your content attract the same readers over and over? Are your social campaigns driving click-throughs that lead to a trial of your service? The ability to quantify your marketing effectiveness will be valuable in determining where you should optimize your time and budget to acquire more viewers.

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