FIVE WAYS BIG DATA WILL CHANGE VIDEO ENTERTAINMENT

http://youtu.be/GUM5mrU4rq0 Big data, one of the hottest topics in technology, remains an untapped opportunity in video services. Andy Aftelak, VP of Advanced Research at ARRIS, reviews the Top Fiv...

http://youtu.be/GUM5mrU4rq0

Big data, one of the hottest topics in technology, remains an untapped opportunity in video services. Andy Aftelak, VP of Advanced Research at ARRIS, reviews the Top Five Ways that big data will alter the consumer entertainment experience and explore how service providers can use it to stay ahead of consumer demand.

1. Increasingly personalized TV experiences

Big data will continue to give us contextual relevance at unprecedented levels. For example: metadata on what’s actually happening within the content, behavioral information on the viewer and insight into what device they may be using.

Scene-level metadata can provide contextual, semantic cues for personalized and supplemental viewing. It has the potential to offer increasingly sentient content discovery processes, like knowing exactly what you’d want to watch based on your mood – and increasingly cool supplementary experiences – like a call-to-action game appearing in sync with the main screen content. Our recent Consumer Entertainment Index research found that 49% of consumers never click through or follow up on TV advertisement on their connected devices – which shows that personalization has much room for improvement before securing the attention of today’s time-short consumers.

2. Truly targeted advertising

In line with this, TV advertisements have a long way to go to be as targeted as web advertisements, because they still rely on location and demographics. Indeed, our research also found that Traditional TV advertisements are a turn-off to consumers – with 60% downloading or recording a TV program just so that they can skip the advertisements. However, 17% of consumers use secondary devices to purchase products featured on the programs they watch, so there is a big opportunity for the service providers who get this right. With big data, video ads now can dig deeper into viewer preferences and buying behaviors, better matching the ad to the viewer. Furthermore, big data will allow for ads in supplementary viewing experiences (such as a corresponding mobile app) to appear at the right time in the actual content – for example, during a quiet moment of an otherwise explosive drama. Now that’s targeting!

3. Supreme quality of service

More data means better quality of service. It can enable real-time fault repairs and allow providers to predict outages even before they happen. This data-driven network optimization can free up operational resources and technical services and will give providers better insight into planning and scaling their networks for the future.

Our research shows that today’s consumers are still struggling with quality of service – 46% of consumers use an online subscription or streaming service at least once a week, but 73% had problems with streaming subscriptions and on demand services. With big data, providers will also be able to utilize the data gathered from the increasing number of connected devices to instrument the way that Wi-Fi® is distributed through the home. The result? Unprecedented Wi-Fi optimization for consumers.

4. Holistic discovery process

Today’s viewers are used to getting content from multiple sources on multiple devices. However, this process is not very well-managed: consumers still have to sift through various content catalogs – including TV channels, VOD libraries and OTT sources – to find what they want.

With big data, the search process will change dramatically. By making metadata searchable, contextual search will give better results. Automated search will also be improved, with methods like facial recognition enabling new levels of holistic discovery. Viewers will also be able to curate their video content, allowing for a strong social recommendation model – ultimately resulting in services that might look like the “Pinterest of TV.”

5.  Direct marketing measurement

The value of today’s advertisements are determined by measures such as Nielsen statistics. With big data, there will be additional methods of valuation, allowing providers to directly measure consumer interest. In fact, big data will provide insight that can be considered the primary indication of intent – for example, mapping click-through rates and channel-changing tendencies.

Those are just some of the implications of big data for the consumer entertainment experience. For more information on ARRIS’s transformative solutions for big data, please email Andy here. And share your thoughts on how big data will change the world of the video in the comments section, below.