Data is power.
Data is the new oil.
Data is the 21st century gold.

Data metaphors are a dime a dozen today, but they do make a point. Data is truly the driving force in today’s business world, where insights on consumer behaviour drive go-to-market strategies. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the highly competitive Media and Entertainment industry, where viewership trends rule the roost. As a content owner/OTT platform, you could keep pace with the changes or become irrelevant. Remember how Netflix went from being a video-rental-by-mail company to the largest subscription-based platform in the world, with billions of dollars worth of content-spend? That was all data driven.

As a next-generation innovator, how can you leverage data to build a successful media venture? To answer that, you’ll need to know what data can do for you.

Give your content strategy a facelift

As a broadcaster or a digital media company, your first priority should be to determine what content to acquire or produce, for which you’ll need insights along the following lines:

Are you offering a 24/7 curated linear channel? If yes, should the content be repeated? If so, how often and when? Should you intersperse long format with shorter format shows, scripted with non-scripted formats? When should premium content be run?

A powerful analytics platform will give you conclusive evidence of what audiences like and dislike, thereby showing you impactful ways to create a winning programming strategy.

For instance, Amagi’s ANALYTICS platform has determined from a sample of 650 channels across 15 top platforms in our FAST distribution network that News is the most sought-after content genre. Insights such as these are the bedrock on which great content strategies are built.

Ad conundrum? Not a conundrum anymore.

When it comes to advertising, the question remains the same: what is the optimal ad load that works for platforms, channels, advertisers as well as audiences? The rise of connected TV platforms clearly indicates that priorities have shifted. Freedom from ads is no longer a dominant criteria among viewers for choosing a service. But, the quality of ads - fewer and better - remains an essential component. Granular data on audience preferences extracted by robust analytics platforms can give you deeper insights and help you create successful monetization strategies.

Audience data can tell you when viewers stop watching your ads or switch channels, the ideal timespan to get audience attention focused on the ads, and more.

With these data points at your fingertips, you can develop customized ad strategies, serving ads that are not only engaging but also useful to your audience.

Boost your ROI with targeted distribution

Distributing your content to the right platforms is as crucial as building a programming strategy. Without reach, there is no ROI. By leveraging the insights derived from an analytics tool, you can learn where content works well and where it doesn’t, which platforms garner the maximum viewership and engagement, what devices the audiences are hooked to, and more.

Amagi ANALYTICS was able to ascertain that 99% of audiences are consuming their content on Free Ad Supported Streaming TV (FAST) platforms today. Between January to June 2021, ad impressions on connected TV grew by 66%.

Reaching your target ROI becomes easy when you’re armed with such information.

Spice up your strategy with the AI & ML flavor

A dynamic analytics platform can pull out data and convert them into digestible nuggets of information to help you spruce up your content, programming and ad strategy. Add artificial intelligence and machine learning to that mix and what you get is more granular real time actionable insights.

With AI & ML tools like Natural Language Processing (NLP), the data generated gains more depth and layers. For instance, you may have data to prove that your cooking channel is popular with the end users. AI & ML can take it one step further and tell you what cuisines they like. You can build on that by creating customized recommendations for your viewers, adding more textual information to your content (subtitles and name-to-face associations), identifying scene boundaries for ad insertion, building search functions and more. Each and every stage of your programming and monetization strategy can benefit from the capabilities of AL & ML.

For instance, Amagi’s ANALYTICS platform gauged that 9 out of the 25 top performing channels on our systems belong to the news genre. The news channels have been driving 30% of the total ad impressions in the first two quarters of 2021. Our numbers thus reflect that news is witnessing steady demand across FAST platforms. With this information, a content creator can spin up a linear news channel and distribute it to the most popular FAST platforms. AI & ML can then be employed to enhance the user experience by building a playlist of recommendations on trending topics by observing social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Going back to the data metaphors that abound, in this scenario, data becomes the cake and AI & ML the icing.

AT Amagi, we believe that content is going to become more and more a data business. As a modern-day content creator and distributor, you can no longer choose to ignore this truth. While great content will continue to be essential to the success of your business, data driven decision making will differentiate the winners from the ‘also-rans’ in the industry. So why choose to survive, when you can thrive, with the power of data?

Reach out to Amagi to see how analytics can work for you
cloudandme@amagi.com

Srini is a technology entrepreneur with 23+ years of experience in establishing and successfully scaling businesses. Srini co-founded Amagi in 2008 and established it as a global leader in SaaS for broadcast and streaming TV on the cloud. As the Chief Revenue Officer of Amagi, Srini is responsible for revenue growth, inclusive of sales & marketing.