Convergence will fuel online video growth

In just a few short years, video has exploded on to the internet, grabbing amazing mindshare and changing the way people shop, learn, play and communicate. In 2013 India's total video audience grew 74 per cent to reach 54 million viewers, with the average viewer watching 18 percent more videos and spending 208 percent more time viewing online content. Online video consumption is at an all-time high with India's online advertising market being worth $375 million and over 75 million Indians accessing the net via mobile phones.

Marketers are faced with the challenge of catching the attention of the growing online and mobile video audience. In a recent study by Akamai on the effectiveness of online advertisement showed two seconds is all it takes to lose a potential customer's attention. A recent poll of online video viewers showed 91.8 per cent of them would not return to the site within 24 hours of experiencing a failure.

Despite its meteoric adoption rate over the past decade, we are still at the early stages in terms of the online video market. This growth is mainly due to the following three trends:

Increasing availability of premium content: A large amount of the media content is now available online, both live as well as on-demand. Tata Sky towards the end of last year announced the launch of Everywhere TV, which allows subscribers to enjoy their favourite TV channels and movies-on-demand anytime, anywhere. Such initiatives are making it easier for companies to monetise their assets while enabling seamless consumer experience.

Convergence of lean-in and lean-back: With the connected living room becoming a reality through smart TVs, game consoles and set-top boxes, the line between online and offline media consumption is blurring. Tablets and smartphones further contribute to this trend, offering possibilities such as alternate viewing angles, on-demand instant replays on a second screen.

Explosion of mobile device: India's mobile subscriber base is set to cross 696 million connections by the end of this year, according to a Gartner report. The report also highlights that the total mobile penetration in India is expected to reach 72 per by the end of 2016.

Capturing end user's attention and increasing their engagements will be crucial for companies to stay visible. Companies need to adopt the online video trend with the audience steadily growing and being constantly mobile. To capitalise on this opportunity, marketers need to unlock a deeper understanding of their audiences. Online media analytics is the key.

An effective media analytics solution provides the following:

• Enhanced audience tracking thereby enabling you to identify changing user behaviours such as gross viewership numbers, visits/repeat visits etc.
   
• Quality monitoring that ensure user satisfaction and service level agreement compliance. Quality metrics include play attempts, video start up time, video availability and average bitrates.
   
• Viewer-level diagnostics to monitor and quantify specific user behaviours. This include development of a viewer profile, visit history, visit summary and so on.

In a hyper competitive market, live and on-demand video offerings are no longer optional. In order to drive engagement, businesses need to understand how key factors such as content, packaging, and quality impact audience behaviour. However, this is not very straightforward. The answers may vary across different types of content, different devices, and different audience demographics and they will most certainly change and evolve over time.

Nakul Srinivas, Product Marketing Manager, Asia-Pacific & Japan, Akamai