Viacom

Business Challenge

load or continue to rebuffer and delay. Moreover, there are areas where excess bandwidth is wasted, such as when users are asleep or at work.

Viacom sought to provide an unmatched experience in video delivery – the core of its business. However, the company has many variables to consider: internal systems talking to external systems, content delivery, ad servers, and environmental factors such as Wi-Fi connectivity, over which Viacom has no control.

Analytics Solution

Viacom’s approach began with defining the core KPIs it needed to measure and optimize in order to deliver an unmatched experience in video delivery. Time-to-first-frame (how long it takes a video to start) and rebuffering rate (how often the video stutters) are two examples of metrics that the average video consumer can quickly relate to when it comes to user experience.

With these metrics defined, Viacom embarked on building a real-time analytics platform that would enable the company to minimize time-to-insight and time-to-resolution. Since this was its first foray into real-time analytics, Viacom opted to use primarily open source technology. This approach afforded allowed the opportunity to cheaply learn and experiment.

Today, whenever fans click ‘play’ to watch the company’s content, no matter where they live, or what device they use, the data flows through Viacom’s platform. The solution now actively supports product, engineering, and infrastructure teams throughout the company, was recently extended for A/B testing, and was used to support the 2017 MTV Movie Awards.

Impact

Using this analytics platform, Viacom has reduced the time-to-first-frame experienced by users by 66 percent across its network. This is an extremely significant improvement, as a split second could be the difference between retaining users and losing them.