In 2015, the Opera House launched a major digital transformation project, which included a website redesign and a redesign of the publishing workflow. This was positioned as the foundation for taking the content and marketing strategies, which had been focused on video, to the next level.
SSAI (Server-Side Ad Insertion) is the latest technology that dynamically inserts ads from ad servers, providing viewers with a TV-like viewing experience without the time lag of switching and without ad blocking. SSAI is the latest technology that provides viewers with a TV-like viewing experience without switching time lags and without ad blocking.
Mainichi Shimbun and MBS adopted SSAI for the first time in the previous year’s 2017 SENBAI. However, the technology was not mature at the time, and they had to use a combination of different solutions for video content delivery and SSAI. As a result, they experienced stressful project management, with specifications not being finalized until just before the opening of the season, etc. They reorganized the project early for 2018, and in the fall of 2017, they decided to adopt Brightcove’s solution, which provided all the necessary functions for live broadcast and SSAI in a single package. The decision was made.
Koji Yoshida, IT Business Manager, Content Business Department, said, “Brightcove provides both the video delivery platform and SSAI as their own products. We thought that the two would work together seamlessly and that it would be easy to deal with any problems that might arise,” he said.
We already had a proven track record. Mainichi Shimbun and MBS had experience using a combination of Brightcove Live and Brightcove SSAI. The Mainichi Newspapers used it for live coverage of the 2017 Inter-City Baseball Tournament, and MBS used it for live coverage of the Dunlop Phoenix golf tournament and the National High School Rugby Tournament, both of which were relatively large scale sporting events, with positive results. It was a big challenge to use it on such a large scale as Senbatsu LIVE! but the track record of Brightcove’s solution was reliable enough.
Sponsorships have also doubled since 2017, exceeding 10 companies. There was a need for more efficient and stable creative delivery, but the integration with the ad server was smooth, and even under the high load of up to 100,000 simultaneous connections, SSAI was able to complete the delivery of ads with no problems.
Brightcove’s live broadcast monitoring service was also used at critical times such as the opening of the event. This involves lining up a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, and PCs, to check for proper delivery, which is monitored remotely by Brightcove engineers. Another benefit is that in the event of a problem, they can quickly identify the cause and take action. Mr. Yoshida said, “Although no problems occurred as a result, we appreciate the excellent service that provided us with peace of mind.
The ease of use of Brightcove Video Cloud was also significant. In addition to the live broadcasts, many VOD videos, such as highlights, digests, and whole game videos, were also delivered for the “Senbatsu LIVE! The ability to centrally manage both live broadcasts and VOD videos with the same CMS has reduced operating costs.
Ishikawa said, “Senbatsu LIVE! has come to be a service that can be enjoyed by a large number of viewers, comparable to TV broadcasts. We could not just say, “It’s a free Internet broadcast, so it’s okay if there are a few glitches,” and we felt a heavy responsibility for the number of users. I am grateful that we were able to proceed with this project so smoothly.
Video has long been one of the most effective and engaging mediums of visual communication. As digital marketing continues to evolve, we’re seeing a growing trend in the use of video as one of the first touchpoints to engage audiences. Replacing the traditional image carousel and banner, hero video integration has become a key tool for brands looking to showcase a product or service.
Sydney Festival is a great example of an Australian brand leveraging hero video on its site. The long-running festival selected Brightcove to enhance its online video content with a focus on hero videos and autoplay functionality ahead of its January 2018 event.
Hero video integration, used across its homepage and event pages, and acting as a ‘visual teaser’ to attract audiences, is an important play for Sydney Festival. With Brightcove, Sydney Festival can seamlessly integrate video content across its website, offering users an in-depth, rich visual user experience. Autoplay functionality is also key to keep audiences engaged with a taste of the festival.
Previously, Sydney Festival hosted its videos on YouTube and embedded them into website pages for event promotion. Time and time again, brands have initially opted for third-party video hosting platforms over direct video integration, which often comes at the cost of the user experience. With these third-party platforms brands have very limited control over functionalities like analytics, player customization, and overall aesthetics. Selecting Brightcove however, Sydney Festival now has full control over the video viewing experience.
For brands operating in today’s digital world, ensuring video is seamlessly integrated into their users’ overall experience in a controlled, brand-consistent way is essential. Hero videos are a fantastic way to offer an immersive, visual online experience and this is the reason we have seen it make its way into website designs. Digital-savvy brands are cottoning on to hero videos as a way to quickly enhance user experience, and this is why we have it pegged as one of the defining trends in video marketing for 2018.
If you’re interested in learning more about hero videos and how it can enhance your brand’s online video experience check out the Brightcove video player.
Recently, LF has transformed itself from a company mall to an integrated mall, and has achieved explosive growth, while TMON has established itself as a major player in the EC industry. These two companies have announced new live commerce services called LFON and TVON Live, respectively.
Over the past few years, Rogers Media, a leading Canadian media company, has transformed its business model to cater to the needs of busy viewers. By turning its focus toward video, Rogers now provides on-the-go audiences with convenient viewing options across all digital devices and distribution channels.
Two of the company’s most popular media brands—City and Sportsnet—have been successful in expanding audience reach through video. City digital programming currently draws three million monthly viewers, while Sportsnet has scaled to reach 30 million viewers annually through multi-platform distribution.
Rogers reaches nearly 90 percent of the Canadian TV viewing public through its massive collection of media brands, including City and Sportsnet. While the City brand delivers content ranging in topics from health, art, politics, and family to US-acquired primetime shows, Sportsnet is Canada’s number-one trusted source for all things sports entertainment. It delivers premium coverage of local, regional, and international events, plus in-depth storytelling. For each of these properties, Rogers offers an accompanying mobile app (City Video and Sportsnet App, respectively), which gives audiences the chance to watch current season programming, all free and on demand.
For Sportsnet’s superfans, Rogers also offers a subscription-based OTT channel, Sportsnet NOW, which delivers 24/7 live stream access to Sportsnet broadcasts and exclusive content not available on TV. Accessible via desktop, iOS, Apple TV, and other connected platforms, Sportsnet NOW offers consumers a way to catch the action without a cable subscription. As a result of extending across these new platforms, the Sportsnet brands increased cumulative monthly viewership by an average of 42 percent in 2016.
By leveraging Brightcove’s video platform, Rogers has successfully enhanced its distribution network to expand overall viewership and audience engagement. For Brightcove’s high-functioning, adaptive platform, superior player technology and customizable features have given Rogers, and Sportsnet in particular, the ability to distribute content wherever its viewers are, at any time, and to any device.
“We know sports fans are looking for news, information, and entertainment many times a day, all times of day, in various locations,” says Kasra Zokaei, director of digital product development, Rogers Media. “So we need to be able to connect with them. “And we’ve been a pioneer in terms of making available our television channels to over-the-top subscribers…It’s very important for us to connect with digital audiences where they are, whether that’s our owned-and-operated properties or social network distribution points.”
The Brightcove Player provides fast, uninterrupted viewing for mobile audiences and allows Rogers to individually modify players to meet the needs of its different media brands.
“In general, we’ve found Brightcove’s product plans and roadmaps align nicely with our needs, whether it’s SSAI, Brightcove Social, mobile SDKs, or integration with different ad servers. Brightcove is really a partner to us. There is a strong fit between the needs of our business and what Brightcove recognizes as trends in the media industry and priorities for media companies,” explains says Dale Fallon, director of digital product management, Rogers Media.
Tell me if any of these questions sound familiar:
Constantly fielding questions like these – from your boss, your CMO, and various stakeholders on different teams – is the new normal for marketers. What’s the commonality? These frequent requests are centered around the cause behind performance and return on investment. You can lump this all under one giant category: attribution.
Simply stated, attribution provides visibility into how much money you spent and the return you received from it. For a very basic example, if you spend $100,000 on search engine marketing (SEM) and you can attribute that money to $150,000 in sales, then your return on SEM is 50%.
As the head of demand generation at Brightcove, my team generates thousands of leads per quarter. But as the sales team will tell you, not all those leads convert. Reporting solely on the amount of leads generated is misleading and not really fair to sales. Lead volume as a metric has its place, but ultimately it is too high level and lacks any context to really determine a marketing program’s efficacy. The same premise applies to video. Measuring video performance solely on video views repeats the same mistake.
Video views are simply not enough. Sure, it sounds good to tell your boss the video she wanted has over 1,000 views – but what does that really mean? Instead of measuring by views alone, here are some common attribution questions as they relate specifically to video content:
To truly measure a video’s effectiveness you must go beyond the view. Here is a short story about a Brightcove video, that relatively speaking doesn’t get a ton of views, but still returned exponentially more than it cost to produce and was a competitive takeaway.
A prospect from a financial services company in the midwest watched a product video that describes how Brightcove integrates with Oracle Eloqua. After completing that video, he went on to view two other product videos. The prospect watched 100% of all three videos. We know this because we’ve integrated Brightcove with our marketing automation system and could identify who the actual person was watching the video. So, right away, we know a whole bunch of information:
If your current video solution is only providing video view data you’re missing out on all of this rich, contextual information.
However, having this information doesn’t mean much if you don’t act on it quickly. As B2B marketers and salespeople know, leads don’t have a long shelf life. This is where the the behind the scenes magic happens. Integrating Salesforce, Brightcove, and Oracle Eloqua to alert our sales team of a prospect’s video consumption leads to rapid response follow-up.
Let’s review: Brightcove won a mid-range, five figure contract away from a competitor because our platform’s analytics provide insights beyond just video views, and we took that information and acted on it. Remember, the video that triggered the whole process doesn’t get a lot of views to begin with. If we just measured the success of the video by it’s views it would completely underreport the value of the video. Instead, we can accurately attribute a significant portion of the deal back to that one video and correctly conclude that video views do not tell the whole story.
The bottom line? Don’t undersell your videos and their ROI by defining success based on the number of views.
The OTT entertainment revolution continues with the adoption of Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu collectively topping 245 million subscribers worldwide in 2017. But for Asian content publishers seeking to venture into the OTT market, there is still more land to grab – by targeting the sizable diaspora of Asians dispersed across the world. Here are five steps for content owners to consider in order to succeed in harnessing this unique market opportunity.
Asian countries have some of the most widely spread diasporas in the world. When launching a fledgeling service, start by choosing one or two strategic countries to launch in. It’s important not to rush towards growth too quickly because operating the service in first few initial countries will help to understand how users are adopting the service.
Serving niche audiences by definition does not mean massive scale, but it is evident there are sizable audiences in North America, Europe, and within Asia that warrant further evaluation. Overseas addressable audience sizes are estimated as below:
| North America | Europe | Asia | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chinese | 4.8M | 2.1M | 30M |
| Indians | 5.18M | 2.2M | 15M |
| Filipinos | 4.2M | 0.56M | 3.7M |
| Indonesians | 0.09M | 0.54M | 2.27M |
| Vietnamese | 1.96M | 0.73M | 1.65M |
Audience size is important and so is the propensity to pay for TV content online. According to Digital TV Research, the online TV and video market will be worth over $24 billion in North America alone by 2021, placing it as the top market for online TV and video revenues.
If niche “export” content is priced at a premium, most consumers can reconcile with this because this content is not readily accessible or available mass market in their host countries. However, OTT service providers do need to reconcile that niche offerings aren’t likely to build the same scale of subscribers as a mass market OTT service. And that can be painful. This is where OTT service providers need to strike a balance between ensuring a high-quality video streaming experience while keeping costs associated with bandwidth and storage low so they can have some flexibility over pricing.
Keeping a tight rein on costs means investing in solutions like Context Aware Encoding and Dynamic Delivery to help reduce storage and bandwidth costs. If niche OTT service providers are only relying on subscriptions as the sole source of revenue, then this is not a sustainable approach. Which brings us to the next topic.
Awareness and acquisition campaigns for the diaspora audience are a whole different ballgame. Understanding that these subscribers need to feel connected to their national heritage, OTT service providers need to find cultural touchstones to leverage marketing activities. For example, HeroTalkies (now YUPPTV), the online Tamil movie destination that caters to the Indian diaspora globally, sees their largest growth period during Diwali where they tend to release a chunk of new movies to tie into the festive season and offer special weekend sign-up and festive season passes.
Yearning for the motherland also stretches to local brands that can be difficult to obtain overseas but it does not mean advertising or branded content is irrelevant to this audience. For example, an OTT offering targeted at the Filipino diaspora can be designed like this: buy a 6-pack of a Coca-Cola and get a promo code to watch Filipino blockbuster movie of the week, valid for the existing OTT service subscriber and family member from home country. This brand experience, although unique, can be amplified by facilitating separated families and friends to connect over shared entertainment experiences.
Other sign-up offers can be designed around products that target diasporas, i.e. remittance companies like Western Union could partner up with an OTT service provider and offer promo code to redeem for an OTT weekend pass for remittances up to a specific dollar amount.
Leave the limitations of the broadcast world behind and approach your business model creatively. Consider if there are alternative revenue sources available that do not require charging the end user. Aside from direct revenues, government bodies quite often have grants for cultural promotion. For example, Walter Presents won a government grant from the European Union in 2017 for €450,000 (US $550,000) that will be used to promote European drama in both the UK and the US.
The biggest challenge with building any OTT business is not the applications and delivering the content, but user acquisition and retention. Content owners should devote more of their time and investment in this area and leave the underlying technology to organizations like Brightcove.
Understanding and navigating around the intricacies and challenges of streaming video across the world is what video technology companies like Brightcove specialize in, so that our OTT customers can focus on providing the exceptional video experiences that deliver results and helps them conquer this next frontier in OTT.
High-quality, long-form content continues to shift from being consumed via traditional MVPDs and their set-top boxes to a range of “connected living room” devices that deliver video over IP. This shift is creating lots of IP-enabled inventory which, while it looks like traditional TV, is often monetized differently.
For a TV ad-buyer at a media buying firm, the targeting afforded by IP is exciting but the workflow and measurement conversation may be unfamiliar. A lot of this rapidly growing pool of inventory is being created using server-side ad insertion (SSAI) and the video ad tech ecosystem is under pressure to come together to make this opportunity valuable for the networks, distributors, and buyers who increasingly want to transact programmatically.
In 2017, VideoNuze hosted its annual SHIFT Summit where the main focus was programmatic video. The IAB, SpotX (now Magnite), and Brightcove collaborated on a presentation to address how the ecosystem is progressing on taking advantage of this opportunity.
SSAI is a valuable way to for networks to achieve reach, monetization, and an improved user experience. This was recapped briefly at SHIFT to familiarize anyone in the room who was unfamiliar with this concept.
One broadcaster that runs Brightcove SSAI, MediaWorks, was kind enough to share a case study about how it was able to see a 35% lift in available ad inventory. The broadcaster started reaching connected living room devices and older mobile devices with stitched streams. It started beating ad blockers on desktop web. Additionally, MediaWorks found that reducing the errors and buffering that comes with client-side ads, and delivering a seamless, ad-stitched stream, drove a 14% lift in time spent viewing per session.
Our goal, working with the IAB and the ad tech ecosystem, is to give customers the ability to monetize their video however they wish. If a broadcaster like MediaWorks relies on selling its inventory programmatically, whether in a PMP or leveraging a range of SSPs or exchanges – there may be some education and adjustments required to optimize fill rate and yield in an SSAI workflow.
The good news is that the buy side is excited about SSAI inventory because it’s overwhelmingly available on big screens via Roku, AppleTV, Xbox, etc. and in premium content because the more mature broadcasters and service providers have been the early adopters. SpotX has done buyer surveys which returned data in support of this point.
If the critical parties in an SSAI workflow are reflected by the diagram at the top of this blog post, the purpose of the IAB TechLab and of our presentation at SHIFT was to show how they are all starting to align to support the MediaWorks’s of the world.
An example of where alignment is needed is the verification of inventory sources and video impressions that are coming from SSAI services. Brightcove SSAI has been whitelisted by programmatic technology companies like SpotX to ensure that inventory from our customers is recognized as valid for bidding. SpotX also is taking the step of explaining to DSPs and buy side ad serving companies that the beacons they will be getting, as ads are delivered, often come from the server rather than end devices and are following the required protocols of those buy side partners.
As Kevin Schaum, Senior Director, Advanced Solutions Group at SpotX says, “We’ve spent the past several months solving for the complexities of combining programmatic technology with server side ad insertion. We needed to make sure DSPs have the ability to buy and report on SSAI video inventory, so we’ve had a ton of communication with our DSP partners explaining how SSAI inventory will be sent to them in OpenRTB and the technical requirements for ingesting tracking events sent from SSAI servers.”
Kevin pointed out at SHIFT that DSPs are able to utilize device IDs, IP addresses, and geodata to target audiences across SSAI inventory. Any other targeting parameters that are needed to optimize bid prices (and fill rate) can be passed via key value pairs in the ad request, just as is the procedure in a client-side scenario.
The discussion at SHIFT also touched on the amount of live inventory that is coming online — whether from a linear 24×7 scenario like SlingTV (a SpotX customer) or any number of live sports use cases that Brightcove has been powering. SSAI+SSP workflows support things like podding, competitive separation, and other requirements of linear. With live sports, there is a concern around scale and the step of either conditioning DSP bidders for a massive influx of requests when 500k concurrent viewers hit the 2 minute warning of an NFL playoff game — or finding a way to stagger requests going into an anticipated break. SpotX is also coordinated with the demand side about ways to avoid overspend with many simultaneous requests and preserve their frequency capping targets.
Another area of problem solving falls in the realm of the IAB. For example, the promise of VAST 4.0 to accelerate progress further includes benefits like Universal Ad ID that help stitching services like Brightcove SSAI know that it has already seen and transcoded a piece of creative before somewhere in its system.
With VPAID not supported in SSAI, the importance of VAST 4.0’s ability to separate the video ad file from the sidecar of instructions for measurement and other player-side activities is also important. We’ve already seen the power of being able to deliver viewability metrics from providers like Integral Ad Science when that is a requirement in a desktop SSAI scenario.
The IAB Tech Lab is driving these conversations via the Advanced TV Working Group. Amit Shetty, Senior Director for Video and Audio Products at the Tech Lab, also joined the SHIFT presentation, seeking more industry participation to find, “areas like Universal Ad ID and viewability that need more standardization.”
For SSAI to be adopted, in all scenarios where content owners and distributors want to use it, the ecosystem needs to be aligned.
Brightcove’s position is that SSAI will be the right answer for a high percentage of premium inventory in the future. We counsel our customers to think of it like this (vs. client-side):
With the support of ecosystem pillars like SpotX and the IAB, we’ll see a future where this combination of reach, targeting, and user experience delivers a big payoff. Listen to the VideoNuze podcast for a recap of the themes from the SHIFT summit.
I recently took a trip to the South of France. Even now, months later, I find myself reflecting fondly back on the vacation, and remembering details of my days, things I ate, and places I saw. Could I describe to you what I did last week in my day to day as easily – what I ate, where I went? Honestly, probably not. So why does the vacation stick in my mind? One word: Experience. Experience drives it all.
That very same strategy applies for video. Video that’s powerful and effective, captivating, and memorable is not the video that stays within the confines of the everyday, but instead breaks out of the box and creates an immersive experience that draws you in. It’s not just about putting video on your homepage – it’s about creating memorable video-led experiences.
Great digital experiences are immersive, they are interactive, and they are personal. They change how people feel, how they buy, and what they recommend. And video is the best form of digital communication to provide these experiences.
Video cuts through the noise. At its core, video is about personal, human connection. It replicates the human experience better than any other digital medium. And video translates complex topics into digestible, understandable content.
But just delivering video is not enough – the experience is what engages your audience and motivates them to take that next step. Immersive video experiences transform the ways businesses connect with their audience.
Many marketers simply stick a video on their website and check the video marketing box. But the video isn’t being used as part of a full digital experience. The experience you create around your video should delight the viewer – creating a destination, rather than an interruption.
How are companies innovating with video and achieving big business results? Video leaders are thinking outside the box – literally. They integrate video with the content around it, to drive a truly immersive and memorable experience. They complement video with calls to action, lead forms, and e-commerce links. They tie the content outside the video player to the content playing inside.
Video leaders also think about multiplying the ROI of their page real estate. Instead of embedding a single large player box with the hope that all users will click “play” on that single video, video leaders provide paths that users can select. By displaying a set of engaging video thumbnails, you let the user select what’s most relevant.
With personalized, contextual, video content, you can create different states for your media – specifically tailoring what the viewer sees before, during, and after play.
You can also change that video viewing experience from a lean-back, watching mode, to a lean-in, engaged mode by adding interactive elements to the video experience.
Interactive video is a popular trend in video marketing – and for good reason. Interactivity refers to adding various elements to video content that viewers can actively engage with. It takes what is typically a one way conversation, and turns it into a two way dialogue. Interactivity comes in many forms.
Every click and every action is measurable, providing greater insights into your audience, more leads, better leads, and ultimately more business.
Mitre 10 is a New Zealand hardware and builder’s supply chain. They have created a myriad of DIY video series: from following a family as they build their own tiny home, to makeover shows, to short tips and tricks. They use an interactive video player to make it easy to order the products and solutions featured in each video. By clicking on the materials button in the player, viewers are able to add items to the cart and checkout without ever leaving the video viewing experience. Viewers can binge watch design shows and order materials as they go.
You’ve tied your video directly to revenue, and are now cultivating immersive, engaging experiences that drive real business results.
