Behind the Scenes: Streaming Insights

By Rachel DeSimone on April 24, 2020

There’s an overwhelming amount of headlines circulating these days. With so much going on, it can be difficult to make sense of what is actually happening in our industry, so we thought we’d share some positive updates from our corner of the universe here at Zype. 

We are working hard to continue innovating solutions that power these video services that are keeping the world connected.   We’d like to share some trends we’ve been observing behind the scenes. 

Our customers have seen incredible growth in video consumption over the past month – on average there is a 150% in viewership in the past 30 days; with some experiencing growth rates upwards of 3000%.

The graph below represents the trend in video player impressions across all of our customers. These are unique requests for video players through Zype’s API.  When a web page loads, or someone chooses a video on an app, a request is registered.

Streaming Insights

You can see the stark contrast in growth from March to April in 2020 compared to 2019.  The same period last year was relatively flat.  As consumer behavior shifted quickly to more in-home viewing, the growth trend this year is obvious. This ramped up viewership has continued through April and we expect it to be durable for at least the next few months, if not for the foreseeable future due to structural change. 

Beyond video player management, we have seen continued growth across our Video API. An important part of our technology stack creates and manipulates video streams that sit behind video players.  We generate manifests (like a container ship would have a manifest of goods, our manifests list out all the video chunks that go to the video platform or consumer player). These Video APIs service video players we manage, as well as third-party video players and platforms like Pluto TV and Roku directly. This area continues to grow as our customers are offering more video services to market, and viewers are engaging more. 

streaming insights 2

We have also seen interesting trends on the devices people are using since the shift to remote life. The chart below shows the breakdown of video impressions by device.

streaming insights  graph

Roku has the most share of requests, which is consistent with prior months for customers that use our Video API to manage their OTT players, but Desktop has taken a bigger share than IOS (combining both native and browser based requests), which is unusual compared to prior months.  

Desktop consumption has grown by nearly 50% in the past 30 days, which is likely due to the fact that people are spending more time on their computers in their homes.. However, despite the lack of commuting, mobile devices combined (iOS Native, iOS HTML5, Android Native, Android HTML5) are still dominating consumption share at 41.7%, and are also on the rise.  iOS Native impressions have increased by 102% and Android Native by 97% (month over month), so needless to say, people continue to rely more and more on their mobile devices to watch video. 

There’s clearly a massive demand for video these days. We are thankful for the opportunity to help our customers stay connected to their viewers. This is a pivotal moment in digital video, and while we remain thoughtful and concerned for the global community, we are optimistic about our role in providing a highly scalable and connected video infrastructure to our customers.

Want to see our platform and products in action and hear from our customers? Register for our Virtual NAB Showcase on May 6th!

Connect your video with viewers, everywhere.