Nishant Sharma is the Chief Technology Officer at Umbrella Infocare, a new age cloud-tech company specialising in providing best-in-class Cloud-Native Application Development, Data Engineering and Analytics, DevOps Enablement, Cloud Migration and AWS Cloud Managed Services. Known to be a tech geek, Nishant seeks to continuously innovate and empower clients to leverage cloud technology. He is the driving force in building Umbrella’s solutions and services and works at enabling clients to optimise cloud power without compromising on their business requirements. He continues to focus on building a practice that hones DevOps, Automation, Cloud Native Apps and Data Analytics at Umbrella since 2017. Nishant is a seasoned speaker at many AWS events and has in-depth knowledge of AWS and the latest technologies.
A layperson watching a show on Netflix may wonder how the OTT entertainment platform is able to predict individual preferences and shows what to watch next. Yes, the company has made significant progress in the type and quality of content created and marketed by understanding the consumer’s behaviour patterns and to engage profitably with them.
All leading players in the media and entertainment industry such as Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others have succeeded in leveraging big data analytics to gain granular level insights on customer preferences. Besides enhancing customer experience and providing recommendations, data engineering is also used to understand and streamline their systems and business processes better, thereby helping service providers to stay ahead of the curve.
Big Data Analytics is helping entertainment companies to address the constant challenge of attracting and retaining customers and ensuring they are kept engaged with the appropriate content that is of interest to them. Higher business outcomes are achieved with this exercise as content performance can be measured too by leveraging the solution. It also empowers media service providers to analyse relevant content for making key business decisions, as show popularity can be instantly identified. Furthermore, processing of payments can be done faster in addition to improving customer experience.
Delivering customer focused viewing experience with data analytics
For OTT media entertainment platforms, the challenge of customer churn has to be continuously addressed. Customer loyalty is gained by observing viewer behaviour patterns and improving viewer experience, which also has to be consistent across multiple channels, such as web, mobile app or television.
Data is collected by media streaming companies from users based on the subscription plan, location, age, gender, preferred mode of viewing, among others. High volume of viewers’ data comes from multiple sources and in varied formats. Collected data is streamlined for quick analysis and meaningful insights are derived from the huge volume. Cloud-based big data solutions can help in achieving data pipeline for customers and events data, dashboards for analyzing success criteria and accelerate reporting time for capturing real-time occurrences.
Secure and reliable storage of data prevents its corruption and loss with security measures deployed to prevent unauthorized access and fraud detection. From the user subscription and event patterns, the company can gain insights by implementing data analytics. With data on a program ratings, the genres preferred, language used for viewing, preference for a particular category of content or what type of content is more engaging to a particular age group or geographic location, are some of the parameters that can be easily delivered.
By leveraging viewer behaviour patterns, service providers will improve themselves and try to obtain a place among the top most preferred platforms.
Personalised content delivered for personalised experience
The high growth of the entertainment and media industry is driven by the diverse offerings to different target groups, the deployment of big data analytics and the increasing demand for new content.
Personalisation is surely revolutionizing the way viewers consume content and media service providers are monetising this aspect. Personalisation and contextualization lie at the core of the media and entertainment industry. Personalised customer experience has be put in the appropriate context by getting a single view of their customers. The data and analytics is leveraged by media companies to deliver the right content to the right customer on the right platform at the right time.
Besides customer retention and increased viewership, the digital personalised services enable the audience to create their own schedule by opting the kind of content they wish to read, listen or watch next.
Analytics can be used to the delivery of targeted content and to identify which type of content is likely to perform well with viewers. Advertisements, that drive revenues for many OTT platforms are picked up by automated systems and delivered to viewers to what they are looking for along with the aesthetic of the display without impacting the viewing experience in a large way. Analytics can support in optimizing advertisement inventory by predicting the platforms and devices that have high traffic and further tighten segmentation and ad targeting.
Potential big data applications in media industry
The future of media and entertainment industry certainly lies in big data analytics. With 5G technology introduction and improvement in data speed, high growth is expected in mobile media and augmented media experiences. Click data of viewers will be further mined for content production and leveraged for automation. This will present more targeted content recommendations across streaming media and social media platforms. Sophisticated technologies could help in mitigating consumer privacy too. More innovation and disruption add to the revenues of media companies by monetising content.
Data analytics is certainly providing media and entertainment service providers the competitive edge, driving them to invest in effective research across these technologies and domain.