Technology focus > Data analytics
Digital TV Europe
April/May 2016
Data is King
Data is the currency on which TV Everywhere players depend but service providers
are facing organisational hurdles in managing the wealth of information at their
disposal. Adrian Pennington reports.
Data is everywhere but it’s how you
use it that counts. Many service
providers are only scratching the surface of
what is possible. Even where there’s a will to
interrogate data and effect rapid response to
consumer needs or business models, many
multichannel networks face an uphill task to
overcome legacy organisational barriers.
That’s in stark contrast to pure-play streamers
like Netflix or Amazon, which have built a
business on integrated customer service and
technical operations. The OTT providers cross-
correlate data sources that provide insight into
quality of service (QoS), marketing, advertising
and content recommendation. These draw on
remote control commands to the set-top box
18 sent back over the return-path and server logs
that record media player interactions.
With traditional broadcast networks there
wasn’t a huge need for data. The equation could
be reduced to quality of content and how many
people watched. With pay TV the model barely
shifted. If shows were packaged at a decent
price the subscription rate went up. The need
for data wasn’t great since the variables didn’t
waver. When TiVO introduced the concept of
time-shifted consumption the cracks began to
appear. OTT has taken this to another level.
“The internet opened a floodgate of
consumer choice,” says Keith Zubchevich,
chief strategy officer at OTT video specialist
Conviva. “It handed control of the TV from
networks to viewers. The data that is needed
now is of a fundamentally massive order of
difference compared to what has gone before.”
Data types
There are broadly three types of data: consumer
viewing behaviour, programme metadata and
network performance statistics. The latter has
been a factor in network capacity planning for
some time but is also starting to be used in
other areas, such as content acquisition.
“For a long time QoS monitored bit-rates,
how many sessions failed. Increasingly the
data is about what devices are being used and
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