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Conviva and Adobe Primetime:Bringing quality and deliverability for the betterment of OTT television

by Conviva for Adobe


2/18

Intr

oduction Over-the-top (OTT) TV, where viewers watch live, linear and

on-demand programming on internet-connected devices, is

becoming central to the overall TV experience. OTT began whennew pay-TV entrants used the Internet to bypass conventional

TV distribution methods. Today, new and established pay-TV

providers alike are growing their OTT footprint. For pure-play OTT

providers, investments tend to target subscriber growth

and international expansion. For established pay-

TV providers, OTT investments are more aboutcustomer retention and winning back cord-

cutters.

Whether an OTT provider wants to win new subscribers or keep existing

ones, one thing is certain: the quality of the user experience is fundamental

to success. Conviva research shows a clear and direct link between issues

like buering and subscriber churn. It also shows that quality of experience

(QoE) is the number one factor that consumers consider when choosing

an OTT service. In addition, IAB research shows that viewers place signicant

importance on things like picture quality and fast streaming.

In this white paper, well look at the trends driving the shift in consumption

toward OTT; the coverage and quality challenges media companies and

OTT providers face with delivery; and the playback platform and QoE

solutions currently available for solving them. Then well introduce

the Conviva and Adobe Primetime solutions and oer some

recommendations and examples of how to combine them

to maximize that most fundamental of TV business

needs growing and maintaining audience by

delivering the best quality and coverage across

the widest range of devices and platforms.


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TV devices, then and now

The TV device landscape has changed as well and is vastly dierent compared with the early days of television.In the 1970s, 70% of American households had one TV or less. Today, 65% have more than three. Add to that

the 6+ IP-enabled devices (PCs, tablets and smartphones) found in the average American home and most

households now possess nearly 10 screens. And in Europe, the numbers are even higher. The new math of the

multiple-TV and -device household has forced media companies to rethink their distribution strategies.

Clearly, TV consumption preferences and habits are changing, and viewers across all demographics not just

the oft-ballyhooed Millennialsare abandoning conventional TV at a rapid rate. Even baby boomers now get

20% of their TV and lm content from a streaming source. According to a 2015 Conviva research study, overall

conventional TV consumption in the US declined by 7%. A similar study by Accenture reported an even steeper

global decline of 13% . Conventional TVs loss is IP-enabled

TV devices gain. In 2015, the viewing of TV and lm content

increased across all non-conventional devices, and the jump

was far from marginal. Time spent viewing on tablets increased

by 91%; viewing on smartphones increased by 39%; viewing on

TV connected devices increased by 28% and viewing on PCs

increased by 9%.

TVdevices,thenan

dnow

YOY CHANGE IN VIEWING TIME SPENT BY DEVICE FOR AN AVERAGE WEEK (MAY 2014 - MAY 2015)Source: Comparable Metrics: Q2 2015, Nielsen, Dec. 2015

39%

9%

-1%

TabletVideo

SmartphoneVideo

Connected TVDevices

PC Video TV

91%100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

-20%

28%

%

IncreaseorDecreaseinGrossMinutes


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Qualityisnoweverything

Quality is now everything

As more and more people take to their PCs, phones, tablets, game consoles and connected TV devices to

watch their favorite programming or live event, the industry has mobilized to accommodate them. Today,

practically every media company has a streaming oering. But while IP-delivered video is the new norm,

the quality is far from consistent across OTT oerings. And herein lies the biggest challenge for media

companies. Viewers not only expect to be able to watch their programs and lms on any device, they want

the same or better quality that they experience with their conventional TVs.

TV quality and the overall viewing experience is quickly becoming the litmus test for video engagement and

loyalty. In a 2015 consumer study, Conviva found that 35% of viewers picked quality as the key consideration

when deciding on a streaming video service. Quality of experience (QoE), in fact, outranked all of the other

factors, including price, brand recognition and even breadth of content. In other words, to maximize

audience goals, services must provide a superior QoE.

WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN CHOOSING AN OTT SERVICE?Source: Conviva 2015 Consumer Quality Report

0% 20% 40%

Quality of Experience

Amount of Content

Price

Recognizable Brand

35%

32%

23%

7%


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HOW LIKELY ARE YOU TO WATCHFROM THAT SAME PROVIDER AGAIN?

33.6%VERY

UNLIKELY

24.8%UNLIKELY

24.6%UNCHANGED

58.4%CHURN RISK

6.6%VERY LIKELY

8%LIKELY-3

-8

-11

-14 -16

2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

ENGAGEMENT REDUCTION

(IN MINUTES)WITH 1% INCREASE IN BUFFERING

MINS

MINS

MINS

MINS

MINS

Qualityisnoweverything Not only is QoE the key consideration for what viewers watch, its also quickly becoming the deciding factor

for how they watch and even whether they decide to stick with or abandon a particular program or service.

In its annual Video Experience Report (VXR), Conviva highlights the direct correlation between the quality of

the viewing experience and consumer engagement and churn. The report analyzed billions of consumer

streams to uncover the impact that a small (one percent) increase in video playback caused by buering

would aect viewer engagement patterns. Buering is usually caused by an issue in the delivery network

and typically causes the video to stop or slow while the stream catches up to the player. While it should

come as no surprise that people dont like buering, what was surprising is how dramatically the intolerance

for it has grown over the ve years covered by the VXR.

In 2011, Conviva determined that a one percent increase in buering would reduce consumer viewing time

by three minutes. Four years later the expected loss of engagement has more than quintupled. Even more

concerning for media companies is the long-term eects on churn: in addition to watching less, 58.4% of

respondents said an interruption would make them less likely to watch or use the service in the future.

DELIVERY ISSUES LEAD TO ABANDONMENTSource: Conviva 2015 Consumer Quality Report


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TheInete

rnetwasnotmadeforIP-deliveredvideo

The Internet was not made for IP-delivered video

IP-delivered videoin all of its dierent instantiationsis here to stay. To attract and retain viewers, media

companies not only have to oer great programming, they also must ensure coverage and broadcast

quality across every device. The Internet, as it turns out, wasnt built for streaming HD video or multimedia

of any kind. What it was made for was sending small packets of information that could be asynchronously

re-assembled into text messages on a green and black screen, not massive multimedia les that need to be

loaded simultaneously and displayed smoothly in millions of vibrant colors.

While technological advances in everything from microprocessing to

broadband and media encoding have made the streaming

of HD-quality video possible, it has not given mediacompanies any more control over the Internet. Video

quality is determined by many factors, including

the trac and peering arrangements of individual

Internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery

networks (CDNs) that are outside of media companies

inuence. What the media companies and OTT

providers can control is the playback platform and the

quality of the stream to the player or device. But even

that is unavoidably complicated,

especially when considering

the multiplicity of factors that

go into optimizing the stream

for just one player and device.

Now, multiply that by a growing

number of devices and players

and the challenges of full

coverage seems to approach alevel of dizzying complexity.


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Fortunately, these challenges are solvable.

In the following sections, well explore and evaluate the OTT platform and QoE solutions available today

and provide some recommendations and examples of how OTT services can combine the best of them tomaximize their audience metrics, by providing consumers with fully-optimized coverage across the widest

number of players and devices.

Solving for delivery often leaves quality out of the equation

Popular OTT services like Crackle, HBO, Netix and Amazon all provide their viewers with a simple and

seamless experience that contributes greatly to their success. But that simplicity hides the dicult, and

expensive-to-replicate, investment of time and resources that it took to deliver that experience. Streaming

video over an IP-enabled device is an inherently complicated business. It not only requires technology

stacks for media ingesting, encoding and, of course, playback, it also needs others for managing content

and customers. As a business, it must also be able to generate and capture advertiser and or subscriber

revenue, as well as increase those revenues through the integration of sales and marketing analytics and

optimization.

Until recently, the playback platform and QoE choices available to most OTT service providers invariably

included some kind of compromise, in terms of control, coverage or quality, or a combination of the three.

Lets quickly take a look at those options and their respective advantages and limitations.

Solvingfordeliveryoftenleavesqualityoutoftheequation


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Towardamorecomp

letesolution Toward a more complete solution

The unied OTT platform

As OTT continues to grab a bigger share of overall TV revenues, the ability to go to market quickly with an OTT

service will only grow in importance. As weve reviewed, the streaming services that have had the most success

are the ones that are able to monetize the widest possible audience at the highest level of quality and device

coverage. Replicating that successat market speedsrequires an advanced, integrated multi-stack OTT

platform that precludes building it yourself or cobbling it together from multiple existing pieces. Fortunately,

the need for a unied solution has not been lost on the industry, and a few have risen to the challenge. But

not all unied platforms are equal or oer the same level of capabilities or services. When evaluating an OTT

platform, its important to ensure that they at least oer the following capabilities.


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Deliver TV Everywhere

The Internet is an experiment in controlled chaos, and the absence of a true video standard leaves content

providers with a multitude of players, platforms and protocols on which to develop. When choosing a

platform, look for one with an adaptive HLS player and a developer-friendly SDK toolkit. The combination

will make it easier to customize and deliver a seamless viewing experience across the greatest number of

connected TV devices, tablets, smartphones and game consoles.

Unlock pay TV content on any device

Pay-TV subscribers expect to access their programming from any IP-enabled device. Selecting a platform

with an authentication capability enables subscriber verication and entitlement management across all

pay-TV sites and apps, netting higher customer satisfaction as well as a potential source of new ad revenues.

Monetize audiences across every screen

OTT services provide an exciting opportunity to generate additional ad revenues. Ensuring the OTT platform

can accommodate client and server-side dynamic ad insertion for VOD, linear and live video content permits

seamless TV-like ad experiences with no buering or playback errors. Also validate the solution can isolate

experience metric issues in real-time to retain audience.

Protect your content

The protability of OTT services has been built on the back of strong, and hard won, intellectual property

protections. The chosen platform should also include a scalable and robust digital rights management

(DRM) capability. One with a variety of license delivery methods which aords safe publications of digital

content and leverages full device coverage to monetize the widest possible audience.

Towardamorecompletesolu

tion


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AdvancedQoEmonitoringandoptimization Advanced QoE monitoring and optimization

While OTT providers have ready access to their own audience and engagement metrics telling them whos

watching what and for how long, they have very little insight into the reasons why the numbers are what

they are, nor how they measure up to other competitors in the space. With broadcast

programming, a drop in views, for example, can be directly attributed

to content or scheduling. But with OTT content, so many other

experiential factorsISP trac, start time, buering, and

otherscome into play that its impossible to make thesame inference without data to benchmark the viewing

experience. Likewise, those benchmarks are only valuable

when compared to industry numbers, which create the

necessary context to understand how good the viewing

experience really is.

Until recently, the QoE metrics that could complete the story

have been one-dimensional, dicult to obtain on an actionable

basis, and nearly impossible to normalize across the range of

devices, players and platforms. But today, thanks to a handful

of vendors, businesses have access to multi-dimensional QoE

solutions that not only can monitor each stream in real time

for over a hundred experience metrics but also normalize and

correlate the data with engagement and audience KPIs for the most

complete picture. Providers can also access a rich library of current

aggregated metrics to place their own results into the context of the

market at large. But, again, a wide gap in capabilities separates somevendors from the others. When evaluating video QoE solutions, you

want them at a minimum to be able to provide the following.


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C

onviva&AdobePrimetime:Thebenetsofintegration Conviva and Adobe Primetime: The benets of integration

Adobe Primetime

When Turner Broadcasting came to Adobe in 2009 with the idea for TV Everywhere, there were

few other companies in existence, if any, with the technological experience and

capabilities to make the ambitious project a reality. The result of that

collaboration was the Emmy-award-winning Adobe Pass, now

Adobe Primetime authentication. It enables pay-TV subscribers

to access live, linear and VOD content on any IP-enabled

device. Through Adobe Primetime, billions of global

viewers have been able to share in the enjoyment of

premier events like the Olympics, the Academy Awards,

and Super Bowl XLIX as well as their favorite regular

programming on their own time and terms. Today,

Adobe Primetime is widely recognized as the industrys

premier OTT platform solution. Even OTT pioneers,

such as MLBAM and Turner Broadcasting, recognize

Adobes advanced capabilities and leverage Primetime to

insert ads, provide authentication and DRM, power playback

and live streams and ensure consistent coverage across more

than 400 devices.

With Primetime, OTT service providers not only get the most advanced and

device-compatible live, linear and VOD player but also a fully integrated stack to

leverage existing broadcast workows and monetize, run and optimize their business.


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COMPREHENSIVE INFORMATIONExperience directly supports top-line business goals

EXPERIENCEMEASUREMENT

ENGAGEMENTMEASUREMENT

AUDIENCEMEASUREMENT

WhatcanConvivaandAdobePrime

timedo?

What can Conviva and Adobe Primetime do?

Adobe Primetimes integration with Conviva creates a new standard for OTT platforms. To Primetimes capability

of creating a video business for any device, Convivas QoE stack adds the ability to instantly diagnose issues and

enable service resiliency.

Conviva

Like Adobe Primetime, Conviva possesses a technological and experiential edge that has made it the leading

provider of Experience Management solutions, and choice of premier content providers like Sony, HBO, ESPN,

CBS and Sky. Through its services, Conviva analyzes more than 4 billion streams per month on 1.6 billion unique

devices, giving its users unparalleled intelligence of what is going on around the globe and how its aecting video

performance over the Internet. By recording detailed real-time information on each viewer for every session,

OTT providers not only get insight into what is happening but the intelligence and tools to preemptively x issues

before it aects viewership.


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Wha

tcanConvivaandAdobePrimetimedo?

Get instant and actionable QoE metrics for every device covered by Primetime

For the unied solution, Conviva and Adobe worked hand-in-hand to develop a pre-integrated set of

libraries that work automatically with any Primetime supported device, protocol or system be it Android,

iOS, Flash or whatever comes next. As such, Conviva works out-of-the-box to give you comprehensive QoE

metrics on the more the 400 devices covered by Primetime.

Compare and contrast performance across devices, platforms and systems

While Convivas code extracts information from each stream and device on a granular level, the

data is normalized before being transmitted back to the Conviva platform. With Conviva,

you can condently compare and contrast and benchmark QoE metrics across

devices, systems and platforms, for a truer gauge of volume and business

performance than otherwise possible.

Expedite time-to-market

Even with a developer-friendly SDK, the development cycle

for new device coverage could take a development team 6-8

weeks to complete. The Conviva pre-integrated package for

Primetime comes out of the box ready for testing, eliminating the

need for development, and can be ready for production in typically

one week or less, once testing is complete.

VIDEO APPLICATION

Adobe PrimeTimePlayer

Conviva PrimeTimeClient Library

ConvivaPlatform

Internet

Collects Adobe

PrimeTime video

quality data and ships it

to Conviva Platform

Ingests incoming

video quality data and

computes end-user

Conviva Pulse metrics

From day one,

Convivas mandate

has been to provide the

best experience possible

for our OTT service providers.

Complementing Adobe Primetimes

goal of providing the best solution

for end-to-end services, Conviva together

with Adobe helps our mutual service providers

dominate the market by deploying optimized OTT

solutions with greater agility and a wider device

reach.

Dr. Hui Zhang, Founder and

Chief Executive Ocer

Conviva


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CaseStudy:SonyCrackle

SonyCrackle: leveraging the Adobe-Conviva partnership todeliver a better viewing experience across all screens

Challenge

Crackle had added an array of new, quality programming oerings

but deliverability issues were limiting full viewer

engagement.

Solution

The combination of Primetime and Conviva gives

Crackle unparalleled control over the viewing

experience. Primetime allows Crackle to deliver and

manage content across more than 400 devices. With

Conviva, Crackle can monitor the quality of each

stream and correlate engagement with experience.

Results

With the unied Primetime-Conviva solution, Crackle was able to increase quality and user engagement

and get the correlated experience and audience metrics it needed to make more informed editorial and

marketing decisions.

82% improvement in buering ratio

50% increase in average bitrate

2-8 minute increase in time watched per viewer

Its imperative for us to understand our audiences behavior and

ensure their experience is of the highest quality. As such, Crackle

relies on Conviva [and Adobe] to provide data on and to optimize

the quality of that viewer experience and ensure continued

engagement with our content.

Daniel Sanders

VP Technology,

Chief Software Architect

Sony Crackle


18/18

Adobe Primetimehas always valued

Conviva for bringing

quality of experience front-

and-center when delivering OTT

services. With this partnership, both

Adobe and Conviva can serve our joint

customers better by bringing their service

to market faster while maximizing quality and

engagement.

Campbell Foster

Director of Product Marketing

Adobe Primetime

Adobe Primetime and Conviva allow OTT providers to

deliver the video quality customers now demand

As IP-delivered video continues to take screen time away from conventional

TV, viewers will increasingly expect and demand better quality from their

OTT providers. Adobe Primetime has clearly separated itself from other OTT

platforms with its breadth of device coverage and range of complementary

capabilities. By partnering with Conviva, Adobe can now give OTT providers

a way to close the gap between what is possible and what can be delivered

on a unied platform.

1 Nielsen, Total Audience Report (2015)

2 US Statistical Abstract, 1980

3 User Survey Analysis: Gartner

Consumer Insights People

at Work and Play in 2014

4 eMarketer (2015)

5 Accenture, Digital Video and the

Connected Consumer

Conclusion

Silicon Valley +1 (650) 401-8282

New York +1 (718) 280-1351

d

# EXPERIENCE EXCELLENCE

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