Jan 9, 2023

What are some effective ways to draw quantitative conclusions from qualitative data about streaming and OTT quality of experience (QoE)? Nadine Krefetz, Consultant, Reality Software , Contributing Editor, Streaming Media chats with Melissa Yurash, Senior Customer Success Engineer, Conviva about the ways that her company approaches these issues. Krefetz begins by mentioning that Conviva has a unique knowledge base and acquisition approach for its customers. She asks Yurash about the most common type of question she gets from customers. “Most of the questions are going to be very specific,” Yurash says. “But I think that there is a general pattern for all of the questions that I get, and that's the existential question of how do you define an experience? What we're really trying to do here is measure something that is qualitative and make it quantitative, and how do you measure that? So that's what we do here at Conviva that I think is really exciting and interesting.” Yurash notes that the industry has developed a new focus on the networking and infrastructure sides over the past two years. “For example, the industry benchmark on rebuffering was more so around 2%, and now it's at 0.2%, which is amazing,” she says. “And so I think we're really looking at redefining how we measure that experience as engagement.” She says that the core question is how engagement should be defined, along with how to define quality and experience. Krefetz asks, “When you're talking about engagement, are there kind of specific personas or buckets that you typically see?” “That’s interesting,” Yurash says. “I think that the way I would first break that down is...live and Video on Demand (VOD). If it's VOD, is it movies, or is it episodes? Because the biggest question there to me is, do you have bingers, and are they autoplaying? And is your recommendation working effectively enough that your autoplay is capturing at least 60%, so that at least 60% of the time they are just using the autoplay and they'll continue to binge to the next episode.”