Gaining insight into the performance of video services user experience must be incorporated as a core part of a video service’s product management process. It should drive activity like product feature prioritization and changes to the user experience that impact the overall customer engagement, thus helping detect UX inefficiencies and enhancing it with a data-driven approach.

It’s undeniable that video consumption is on the rise. The upward trend speaks for itself. Let’s look at some of the stats:
– 45{1e556b0dda4010577b784b4e8e746da95ecb739eaec1707a25fd3098bb696a30} of people watch an hour or more of video per day
–  63{1e556b0dda4010577b784b4e8e746da95ecb739eaec1707a25fd3098bb696a30} of businesses use video for marketing
– 50{1e556b0dda4010577b784b4e8e746da95ecb739eaec1707a25fd3098bb696a30} of web users look for a video before they visit a store
– 1mm minutes of video per second will cross the internet by 2020
– 10Bn videos watched on Snapchat per day

And still, at the same time, the digital video market is becoming highly competitive. Among the numerous reasons, there are two we want to highlight.

Video and Internet giants have made a significant investment in original content thereby setting a high bar for the rest of the industry. How do video service providers add value when the content they offer is not original and can be found on multiple services, not exclusively with one provider?

In addition, users are increasingly more demanding, yet fickle; they have a number of OTT service subscriptions at their fingertips, and in many cases, they also have Pay-TV. Depending on the perceived value of a service (in terms of what content is available in the catalog, the user experience, the ease with which pertinent content can be discovered) they don’t think twice about signing up for – or unsubscribing from – different services.

In such an ever-changing and competitive environment, decisions have to be made at unparalleled speed in order to attract, engage, and retain new customers. Data is the key element that underpins these decisions.

Digital video services generate huge volumes of data that represent an opportunity previously unseen in the industry (only exploited by companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google) — an opportunity to more efficiently manage the video business and achieve a greater ROI.

However, there are still barriers that impede the roll-out of sound data-driven video strategies. Among these barriers we can mention:

– Players in the industry still haven’t prioritized data-driven strategies.
– Despite the fact that many have made substantial Big Data investments, the reality is that they lack actionable data.
– It’s also true that data sources are fragmented and come in many different formats.
– Even today, when it comes to analytics, video businesses continue to be operationally oriented. There is no real focus on business insights.
– Those that do invest in a data-driven approach incur a high cost of human capital with processes that are minimally automated.
– Much of the time, data is too old to be used for decision-making and is based on old technology that does not provide data as quickly as the market today requires

But  Why is the user experience in the context of the data-driven video so important? Know more here