The News: Online video technology provider Brightcove has launched a new analytics tool that measures and reports what they are calling the “quality of experience” for viewers watching videos hosted on its platform. The company launched the offering at last week’s National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow held in Las Vegas and provided details on the new service in this Press Release.
Brightcove Launches Tool to Measure Viewer Experience
Analyst Take: With the introduction of its Quality of Experience (QoE) Analytics and Insights tools, Brightcove is serving up loads of new performance data that at first glance may seem to be an overload of information for most users of a video communications platform. The tool measures the performance of the Brightcove system across a range of performance metrics, such as video error rate, the amount of time it takes a video to start and the extent to which a video may buffer during a viewing session.
In corporate settings, the scope of this information may appear to be overkill for a set of corporate users that historically have been interested only in determining how many people click to watch a video and how many users stick with the video through its entire playback period.
That said, the ability to go above and beyond standard viewership analytics represents a long-term bid from Brightcove to differentiate itself from other providers of video platform solutions. By tangibly quantifying the quality of end-user experience, Brightcove is trying to differentiate itself based on the quality of its video delivery from other platforms who cannot – or will not – offer similar performance metrics.
Over time, the extended form of analytics can emerge as a tool that helps organizations serious about video to learn more about the factors that contribute to successful video adoption. As currently constituted, for instance, the Brightcove analytics dashboard can be configured to correlate how the quality of a video experience correlates with end-users’ propensity to continue watching (or to abandon) specific video content during playback.
The development of this analytics tool represents the first step in creating data sets that could be highly relevant to media companies using the Brightcove platform, as well. The technology provider already is developing solutions – announced earlier this year – that help handle the insertion of video ads into streaming video programming.
Over time, it’s not difficult to envision the development of extended analytics capabilities that marry quality of experience results with data from the ad insertion side of the business. Such data would make it possible for Brightcove and its partners to develop data that measures how different approaches to video ad insertion impacts a programmer’s ability to keep viewers from tuning out of a program they are watching.
While the introduction of a Quality of Experience analytics tool is not something that will help Brightcove ring the cash register in a significant way in the near term, I do see it as representing a strategically important step that could help the technology provider differentiate itself among organizations that are serious about developing a deeper understanding of the nuances that make a difference in leveraging video for business-related use cases.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Steve Vonder Haar is a Senior Analyst with Wainhouse – a Futurum Group company. His area of expertise and focus is enterprise streaming and virtual events.
