The OTT landscape is continually evolving and changing, you must have the ability to adapt with visibility into your audience, platform, and content. This is why data is essential to the success of your OTT app, analytics provide the insights you need to make important decisions about your video business.

Once you have a well functioning and designed app, along with clearly defined business goals we discussed in part 1 of this series, you’re ready to dig into your analytics. It’s important to not only track your KPIs (or key performance indicators) but also extract the value. The real power of data is in the ability to analyze, refine and optimize and continually make improvements that will drive revenue and success.

With all of the available data, it's important to know what metrics actually matter. What are the KPIs that actually help you drive success? It’s all about your audience —who they are, what they prefer and how engaged they are with your app. Because your viewers ultimately determine your success, it’s important to make decisions that will enable you to continue to build and retain your audience.

Your viewers are what drives your video business, it’s necessary to track their behavior and preferences across all their viewing devices. In order to accelerate the growth of your video businesses, you must start with a blueprint of your audience and discover what they care about.

User acquisition serves as a foundation that helps us to track user behavior and retention later on. It’s important to know when and where your viewers are coming from in order to track viewer acquisition trends and performance.

Whether your viewers came from organic search, paid campaigns, word of mouth or referrals, understanding where your traffic is coming from will help to inform and refine your future marketing efforts and make user acquisition more effective.

It’s important to know how many users use your app on a daily basis.  This is especially important if you use AVOD as your monetization model that relies on a large user base in order to be successful.

Tracking which devices your viewers are watching on will help you grow your OTT service on other platforms and devices. Your content should be always be optimized for every screen size, there are video platforms like Zype that take the guess work out of optimizing video and automatically ensure that viewers have a good experience no matter what device or where they are located.

Your user’s geographic location gives you important content insights. If you find you have a large international audience, you may want to add subtitles for better engagement with those viewers. It’s also important to consider your viewer’s location as you develop and produce new content.

Knowing what content your viewers are watching and requesting most is not only an important baseline metric for performance but also will help you make smarter content decisions.

Marketing efforts tend to be more expensive at the top of the funnel (user acquisition), and an app with high user retention can allocate those resources elsewhere, perhaps creating better content to further engage and retain its users.

User engagement metrics are key indicators of the health of your OTT app and preventing churn. In order to retain your viewers for longer, it’s important to uncover gaps user engagement and use the insights to optimize your content.

This metric showcases how long users are spending on your app per session. It’s important to view session duration in terms of how long you expect users to be on your app.

If your videos are primarily an hour long, and the average session duration length is five minutes, you may want to discover the pain point for why users aren’t spending more time watching your content. In order to improve session duration, you must increase how engaged your users are.

How long does it take for a user to use your app again?

Session interval shows how frequently your app is being opened. This metric can be increased by encouraging regular app use.

If users are using your app very infrequently, you can uncover certain gaps of value that can be improved to increase how engaged they are with your content.

When your users log in, how many hours of video are they watching? Are they watching more live streams? Or are they watching more on-demand streams?

Tracking stream hours over time will not only reveal how engaged users are with your content, but which type of streams are most effective. If your live stream hours have started to drop, it’s time to evaluate why your users are no longer seeing the value.

How many new users have signed up for a subscription or made a purchase? This is important to track the growth of users on your app. If it is stagnating or starting to drop, this reveals pain points that are affecting user's acquisition and churn.

If you are using more than one revenue model to monetize your content, it’s important to see which model is most enticing to new subscribers. If more users are signing up for subscriptions, your viewers are seeing enough value to warrant a subscription and are more likely to stay engaged. If you find a trend of users choosing to only purchase a single rental, they’re likely not seeing the value in your overall content library.

All of these metrics and more can be tracked on the Zype Analytics dashboard. Use these KPIs to better understand how well you’re doing at retaining and growing your audiences. More importantly, use these KPIs to analyze, refine and optimize your content and app, and continually adapt to your audience’s ever changing preferences.

If you let the data inform your content, marketing, and platform, you’ll have an enormous advantage over the competition. Powerful analytics and the ability to fundamentally understand your audience is are absolutely essential to the success of your OTT app and overall video business.

How to Run a Data-Driven OTT App | Part 2: The Metrics That Drive Success

In order to be successful and make good business decisions, content owners must have visibility into their audience, revenue, content, and platform. That is why analytics is one of the most important features of an OTT platform and the ability to provide actionable insights.

With so much data available, it’s imperative to not only have the data, but know what data is meaningful to your business in order to build and retain audiences, improve the functionality of your app, and better inform your content strategy. We’ll get more into the metrics that matter in part two of this series.

Yet, before you start digging into your data, it’s important to be sure you have the foundation needed to be successful, this includes a high functioning OTT app and setting data-driven goals for your business to track.

First, it’s important to be sure you have a solid foundation and your app’s performance is meeting (and exceeding) your user’s expectations. Your app is the core of your business and poor functionality can be detrimental to your success. Viewers are less tolerant of load time and low video quality than ever before and poor performance is directly correlated with a decrease of users. It only takes a few crashes for viewers to take their limited attention spans elsewhere.

You’ll want to examine both your frontend and backend metrics, including UX/UI usability, total number of completion or fails of any and all API calls, video serves, traffic patterns, ad serves, credit card processing, loading times, device installs, and errors or service failures. Technical challenges can easily be overcome, but only if you have the data to properly evaluate what exactly is failing your users.

In addition to having a high performing app, it’s equally important to consider and track your user’s experience. Analytics plays an integral role in gaining a real-time understanding of how your users interact with your app that will not only help increase your viewer engagement but drive retention as well.

OTT viewers expect content to be curated and easily navigable within your app’s interface. In order to make your content easy to find and serve your viewers relevant recommendations, it is important to use a content management platform like Zype that allows you to organize your content using metadata and playlists. Having rich metadata and good content structure is just half of the equation, your ability to serve your audience personalized playlists and content recommendations all depend on your visibility into your viewer data.

Data is one of the most effective tools to help build and retain your video audience. Content owners must understand their audience’s habits in order to capitalize on what is working and fix what isn’t.

But before you dig into your analytics, first set clear, actionable goals and decide what metrics are going to push the needle.For video businesses, this is a combination of KPIs from content performance, viewer trends, and revenue metrics. At the bare minimum, you’ll want to track the following:

How are you meeting your overall business goals?

Once you have specific goals you want to track, it’s also important to determine a baseline of your OTT app’s performance over a reasonable period of time. Without knowing where you started, it will be hard to identify any trends, anomalies, and changes over time that will inform meaningful changes.

Having the right tools in place is also essential for effectively tracking your app’s metrics. A good analytical system should be user-friendly and make your data easily accessible with customizable reports and an easy-to-understand user interface.

It can be easy to become distracted by metrics that may look good on the surface but don’t have any real impact on your business, aka vanity metrics. For example, many content owners will focus on video views as an indication of success, but this doesn’t give you any actionable insights. Your view counts don’t tell you anything about your audience or how they are engaging with your content. Setting goals that focus on metrics that indicate quality (vs quantity) will help you continue creating content that viewers love and maximize your businesses revenue.

By diving deep into your data and going beyond vanity metrics, you’ll have the ability to constantly monitor the health of your OTT service, giving you the insights to drive growth that ultimately determines your success.

Now you have the foundation to scale a successful OTT app, check out part 2 for the key metrics that matter to the success of your OTT platform.

How to Run a Data-Driven OTT App | Part 1: The Foundation for Success

In order to be successful and make good business decisions, content owners must have visibility into their audience, revenue, content, and platform. That is why analytics is one of the most important features of an OTT platform and the ability to provide actionable insights.

With so much data available, it’s imperative to not only have the data, but know what data is meaningful to your business in order to build and retain audiences, improve the functionality of your app, and better inform your content strategy. We’ll get more into the metrics that matter in part two of this series.

OTT viewers expect content to be curated and easily navigable within your app’s interface. In order to make your content easy to find and serve your viewers relevant recommendations, it is important to use a content management platform like Zype that allows you to organize your content using metadata and playlists. Having rich metadata and good content structure is just half of the equation, your ability to serve your audience personalized playlists and content recommendations all depend on your visibility into your viewer data.

Data is one of the most effective tools to help build and retain your video audience. Content owners must understand their audience’s habits in order to capitalize on what is working and fix what isn’t.

Having the right tools in place is also essential for effectively tracking your app’s metrics. A good analytical system should be user-friendly and make your data easily accessible with customizable reports and an easy-to-understand user interface.

Now you have the foundation to scale a successful OTT app, check out part 2 for the key metrics that matter to the success of your OTT platform.

In order to be successful and make good business decisions, content owners must have visibility into their audience, revenue, content, and platform.

We’re always striving for excellence at Zype so we hope that every improvement (big or small) has a positive impact for our customers. Here are the latest product updates we’re excited about—let us know what you think!

 Restrictions for MRSS Imports by Date Range 

You now have the ability to restrict your MRSS imports by date range. With the new optional date range fields, now you can easily control which videos get imported into your library from an MRSS feed based off the video published date metadata (pubDate field in MRSS feeds).

Why it’s useful: If you don’t want to import all the videos within an MRSS feed, just specific videos that fall within a specific date range. You also have the ability to set an optional “from” starting date, but leave the “to” ending date blank, which allows you to set a starting date range but continues to sync new videos added to your MRSS feeds.

How to use it : You can set up date range restrictions when creating new imports or add them to existing MRSS imports. To create new MRSS imports visit the main Import & Upload menu and select MRSS as your import source. To modify existing MRSS imports, visit the Video Sources menu and select the MRSS import you’d like to update.

We’re continuing to improve Zype’s API endpoints. Now, you’re able to update MRSS feed URLs for imported video sources via API. While you’ve always had the ability to update an MRSS feed URL in the admin dashboard, this API update is helpful if you have an existing MRSS feed and need to regularly change the URL and wish to do so programmatically.

This is typically used in cases where you have rotating keys on your feed or other parameters that need to be updated often. You can check out the updated API documentation for managing MRSS video source URLs here.

We’re highlighting some of Zype’s awesome existing platform functionality, for your streaming pleasure!

 Configure "Enable At" and "Disable At" Dates for Videos 

You can configure “Enable At” and “Disable At” dates for videos, which allows you to schedule when videos will be made active and inactive to your consumer audience.

Why it’s useful: This is handy for any content that you need to make available within specific time frames. For example, if you’re publicizing the release of a new video for a specific date and time, or if you have licensing rules that require that certain videos be sunsetted from public consumption on a specific date.

How to use it: To access this setting, go to your Video Library page and click on the settings page for a given video. If you scroll to the middle of the “Details” tab, you’ll see the “Enable At” and “Disable At” fields.

These settings are used across all distribution endpoints, from Zype player embeds to any set top box and mobile apps configured to ingest video content from Zype.

We are always working to improve, if you have any comments about our updates or the platform let me know at csmith@zype.com

What's New at Zype This Week: MRSS Import & APIs

What's New at Zype This Week: MRSS Import & APIs. Ability to restrict your MRSS imports by date range, and update MRSS feed URLs for imported video sources via API.

It’s important for video businesses to be able to demonstrate to their stakeholders and investors they are capable of growth, which is challenging because there aren’t any established tools or models readily available to help video businesses predict future revenue potential. So, in order to help content owners understand how to forecast revenue and profitability of their subscription business, Zype recently shared a Revenue Forecast Spreadsheet for Video Subscription (SVOD) Businesses.

This video subscription revenue model is incredibly powerful, but it’s important to understand how it works and why to use it. In this blog post, we’ll get into the key components, metrics, and challenges of building SVOD businesses, and several strategies for success.

 Subscribers, Recurring Revenue, and Customer Lifetime Value 

Customers are the fuel of your subscription business. You rely on the recurring revenue from your subscribers to keep the engine running. That’s why in order to be successful, it’s important to focus your strategy on acquiring new customers, increasing revenue from existing customers, AND retaining your customers longer.

As in any business, you must start somewhere to get your business launched and off the ground. With a subscription business, customer acquisition must always remain a priority. Think once you have sizable base of subscribers it’s time to relax? This is actually when it’s most important to keep your foot on the gas pedal and ramp up your marketing efforts.

Social media and email marketing are the most efficient and effective marketing tools at your disposal to acquire new subscribers. It’s important to have a steady stream of communication with your customers focused on promoting new content and using incentives to drive new subscribers. It’s also important to leverage the insights you gain from your video analytics. Knowing what is and isn’t working helps you make smarter marketing decisions and build up your subscribers quicker.

So now that you have a lot of new customers, what’s next?

Once your video subscription business is firing on all cylinders with a significant amount of subscribes, one key metric you should use to measure the health of your business is Customer Lifetime Value (a.k.a. CLV or LTV). CLV is a simple yet powerful indicator of the projected profit you can expect from your customers during their subscription lifetime with your video business.

You calculate CLV by analyzing the performance of your current customer base and, more specifically, by multiplying your average profit per user (average revenue per user/customer less your average user/customer) by their average lifetime as a subscriber. For instance, if your subscribers spend an average of $10 per month, your average cost per subscriber is $5 per month, and your subscribers stay for an average of 12 months, your effective CLV would equal $60. Petty straightforward, right?

You may be thinking, “great, I know the health of my existing customers, but how is this helpful for forecasting?” It’s easy, really - multiply CLV by the number of new customers you expect to acquire each month. Using the CLV of $60 and average subscriber lifetime of 12 months from the scenario above and assuming you acquire 1,000 new subscribers per month, you’re able to forecast that each month you will acquire approximately $60,000 of profit to be recognized over the next twelve months. That’s an additional $5,000 of monthly recurring profit. Money in the bank!

As you can see, Customer Lifetime Value is more than just a way to track the health of your current business. It’s also a powerful method for forecasting your profit potential. To recap, keep a close eye on your key subscriber metrics - average revenue, average cost, and average lifetime. They’re dynamic so you must continually monitor, measure, and improve each as they impact your CLV. You might be wondering, “wait, these numbers change a lot?” Yes, it’s the cold hard truth in subscription businesses. Let’s dive in and investigate the drivers that affect your subscriber metrics.

Subscriber churn is intricately related to your subscribers metrics and significantly impacts  your CLV. The fickle nature of customers is and has always been the cause of uncertainty and challenges in running a subscription businesses. Your subscribers can, and will , cancel their subscriptions. It is inevitable, but there are ways churn can be mitigated.

Let’s now discuss the effects of churn. For this scenario, let’s pretend that you have only your existing customers to generate and maintain revenue and won’t be able to acquire new customers. Your challenge is that subscriber churn will continue to erode your monthly revenue. For example, if you start with 1000 subscribers and 5% of your customers churn each month, what are you left with in twelve months? That would mean you have 50 subscribers leaving per month, adding up to 600 subscribers leaving per year. At the end of the year, you only have 400 subscribers left. Yes, that a 60% loss in revenue over the course of the year. Not a pretty sight.

As I mentioned earlier, Customer Lifetime Value is impacted by Subscriber Churn. But how? What is the underlying driver? It all come down to your key subscriber metrics. Churn directly affects your CLV. Using our examples from above:

6 month average lifetime (instead of 12 months from above)

Our effective CLV is $30.00. That’s 50% less than our first CLV example. Why? Yep, you guessed it. Subscriber churn. Higher rates of churn will drastically reduce your average customer lifetime. This is a very exaggerated scenario but hopefully clarifies how important it is for you to be resilient and focus on minimizing churn as much as possible.

One tactic to retain your customers for longer is to always keep your content fresh and frequent. If your subscribers continually have new and engaging content to watch, they are much much more compelled to keep their subscription. In terms of consumer psychology, this behavior can be attributed to “fear of missing out” and “loss aversion”. Simply put, your subscribers will want to stay with you longer because they fear they will miss out on your content (FOMO is totally real) and don’t want to lose access to the entertainment experience you give them. In addition to frequently releasing new content, it’s equally important to engage with your audience. Whether it’s through live streaming, email or social media, you’ll retain more customers with an open line of communication.

Here at Zype, one of the best practices we use for retaining customers is to ensure our customers recognize value from our product, as fast as possible. If we apply this approach to video businesses, we can consider “value” to be the quality of your video content. You must focus on the underlying technology and making it easier for your subscribers to stream and watch your video content. At Zype, we’ve made it easy for publishers and content owners to quickly deploy web and OTT endpoints to stream their video content.

We’ve covered a lot of important items in this blog post so here’s a quick TL/DR; version:

Subscribers are the fuel for your subscription video business

Acquiring new subscribers is and should always be one of your highest priorities - use best practices for marketing & promotions to get new subscribers

Customer Lifetime Value is an invaluable metric for measuring both your existing customer base and forecasting future profits.

Monitor, Measure & Improve CLV by tracking your customers’ average revenue, average cost, and average lifetime

Subscriber churn is inevitable. It negatively impacts your CLV

Combat subscriber churn by keeping your content fresh and frequent. Continually engage with your existing subscribers to maintain share of mind and tap into their FOMO.

I hope that this has given you a better idea of just how important subscribers are, and how churn can be mitigated. Have any questions? Feel free to comment below or shoot me a note at Cal@zype.com

Be on the look for my next blog post where I review and provide details on how to use our Revenue Forecast Spreadsheet for Video Subscription (SVOD) Businesses.

Subscription Video Business 101: Basic Strategies and Metrics You Need to Know to Build a Successful SVOD Business

As viewers increasingly replace their cable and satellite TV subscriptions with OTT, or over-the-top, streaming devices, advertisers risk missing out if they continue to focus on traditional linear tv. Without the interference of the traditional middlemen, OTT offers content owners and advertisers alike the opportunity to connect better with audiences and ultimately drive more revenue.

Historically, advertising has been a key component for content owner's profitability. Now, as more content owners make the switch to OTT, they fear advertising will cost them viewers and rely heavily on subscription revenue instead. If they don’t incorporate advertising into their monetization strategy, it's likely content owners will end up leaving a significant revenue stream on the table. In fact, many video businesses find the most success strategically combining advertising, subscription and, transactions, or a hybrid model to monetize their content.

Compared to traditional television, OTT is much more capable of delivering a highly engaged and targeted audience for advertisers. It’s become increasingly challenging to advertise effectively on traditional TV, yet advertisers continue to spend significantly more on traditional TV (around 70 billion), compared to digital video (around 13 billion).

People’s tolerance for advertisements is at an all time low and thanks to the DVR, viewers take every opportunity to fast-forward through advertisements. Cable networks continue to saturate their programming with longer and more frequent advertising. As a result, viewers are becoming increasingly fed up paying a premium to be bombarded with an excess of untargeted advertisements.

It’s difficult for traditional TV to deliver relevant ads to users. In order to appeal to the broad audience of traditional tv, the message must have mass-appeal and advertisers lose the opportunity to target specific audiences. This may work for massive consumer brands like Budweiser or Honda, but isn’t realistic for smaller, more specialized brands and products.

Today’s audiences demand control over their advertising experience and OTT platforms give users that control by offering the choice to either skip over advertisements or pay for an ad-free experience. People’s frustration with cable’s increasing advertisements has peaked. Viewers have realized OTT is more cost-effective, with similar content offerings, and offers control over advertising. In fact, “too many commercials” is one of the top reasons people cut the cord and cancel their cable subscription.

It isn’t just viewers that find OTT an appealing alternative, it gives advertisers the best of both worlds—the viewability and engagement of traditional TV advertising with the precision and direct targeting of digital web advertising. OTT delivers a highly desirable and engaged audience. According to Nielsen research, the average OTT viewers are younger and more affluent compared to traditional tv viewers. They’re also highly engaged, completing 98% of all video ads.

OTT provides more visibility into what’s being watched, who’s watching and on what device. This gives advertisers the ability to create highly personalized and interactive advertising experiences. Not only are the ads more relevant for users, behavioral and purchase data targets audiences who are most likely to make a purchase.

OTT’s precise targeting is an advantage for content owners serving the ads as well. Viewers are much more receptive to advertisements when they are relevant and given the opportunity to choose their experience. Video platforms like Zype make it easy for content owners to start making money with advertising and other video monetization models, without demanding a slice of the pie.

OTT offers a unique opportunity for content owners and advertisers alike. If content owners have a large enough audience, they have the opportunity to make more money by incorporating advertising into their subscription video business. Advertisers have the opportunity to deliver precisely targeted ads to a pre-qualified and engaged audience. Viewers are thrilled they’re served relevant ads and have the choice to opt out. Advertising with OTT is a win, win for everyone.

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How to Run a Data-Driven OTT App | Part 2: The Metrics That Drive Success

How to Run a Data-Driven OTT App | Part 1: The Foundation for Success

How to Run a Data-Driven OTT App | Part 1: The Foundation for Success

What's New at Zype This Week: MRSS Import & APIs

Subscription Video Business 101: Basic Strategies and Metrics You Need to Know to Build a Successful SVOD Business

The Advertising Advantage of OTT - A Win, Win for Content Owners, Advertisers, and Viewers

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