Attributed to Dr Neale Foster, COO and VP Global Sales, ACCESS
The proliferation of mobile devices has transformed the way audiences view content and helped fashion a culture of constant connectivity – with catch up and time-shifted consumption replacing the traditional living room TV experience and Over-The-Top (OTT) service providers like Amazon Prime and Netflix taking the traditional broadcasters head on.
Reducing the need for set-top boxes to turn every device into a TV screen, OTT services have immediately embraced multiscreen to offer the best content to consumers both in and out of the home. However, the increase in methods to access services has had an immediate impact on the provider's capacity to analyse consumer behaviour and habits, while creating additional interoperability challenges for services that are natively multiscreen.
Analysing consumer behaviours
Operators have traditionally used their own data gathering systems to better understand their subscribers, but the plethora of devices and the constant stream of OTT content have transformed the notion of TV data aggregation. To be able to harness the power of all these data points without losing track of the information that really matters, OTT service providers looking to embrace multiscreen are increasingly utilizing third party data gathering and analytics solutions that integrate with their services.
These bespoke solutions effectively aggregate and analyze data encompassing subscribers' viewing habits, including type of content and duration of the viewing experience. While these different data points can be overwhelming, valuable multiscreen management solutions, such as ACCESS Twine™, present the most relevant data in a friendly way, such as a dashboard, to help providers know which areas to focus on. This way, they can focus on improving their recommendation engines to meet subscribers passions as well as offering access to various types of content on different devices for users that for instance watch sports on a smartphone, documentaries on a tablet and films on a smart TV.
Personalising the OTT experience for multiscreeners
The prevalence of connected devices means that consumers access OTT content in a variety of ways. It is crucial that operators can differentiate what devices subscribers are using to access each type of content alongside time and location to help them design experiences that adapt to the viewer's needs and preferences, including interaction method (i.e subscribers accessing a service via their game console will need the platform to accommodate a joystick rather than a TV remote or the finger tap preferred by mobile viewers.) This knowledge enables OTT service providers to offer seamless delivery of targeted content and personalised recommendations per consumer, but also facilitate search and discovery for each device.
ACCESS Twine™ has been designed to facilitate the creation of seamless experiences across devices, combined with secure delivery of content, effectively killing two birds with one stone – and with development and test phases becoming shorter by the day, it provides OTT service providers with an effective answer current challenges.
Combining data on viewer habits and monitoring the devices used to access the service provides more flexibility to multiscreen OTT service providers. This way, they can offer best in class experiences on the right device and potentially extend the number of licenses for multiscreen subscribers. In addition, data opens the door to highly personalized advertising such as pre-roll and post roll videos, creating exciting new monetization opportunities.
