Conviva and Adobe Primetime:

Bringing quality and deliverability for the betterment of OTT television

by Conviva for Adobe

Introduction

Over-the-top (OTT) TV, where viewers watch live, linear and

on-demand programming on internet-connected devices, is
becoming central to the overall TV experience. OTT began when
new pay-TV entrants used the Internet to bypass conventional
TV distribution methods. Today, new and established pay-TV
providers alike are growing their OTT footprint. For pure-play OTT
providers, investments tend to target subscriber growth
and international expansion. For established payTV providers, OTT investments are more about
customer retention and winning back cordcutters.
Whether an OTT provider wants to win new subscribers or keep existing
ones, one thing is certain: the quality of the user experience is fundamental
to success. Conviva research shows a clear and direct link between issues
like buffering and subscriber churn. It also shows that quality of experience
(QoE) is the number one factor that consumers consider when choosing
an OTT service. In addition, IAB research shows that viewers place significant
importance on things like picture quality and fast streaming.

In this white paper, well look at the trends driving the shift in consumption
toward OTT; the coverage and quality challenges media companies and
OTT providers face with delivery; and the playback platform and QoE
solutions currently available for solving them. Then well introduce
the Conviva and Adobe Primetime solutions and offer some
recommendations and examples of how to combine them
to maximize that most fundamental of TV business
needs growing and maintaining audience by
delivering the best quality and coverage across
the widest range of devices and platforms.

Viewers today have a wealth of OTT options to choose from. They can leverage an OTT or TV Everywhere
service from their current multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD), such as their cable or
satellite TV provider. They can also supplement or replace a traditional TV package with one or more directto-consumer OTT services. Uptake is strong across these options. At the end of 2014, more than 40% of
US homes were subscribed to an OTT premium service. In TV Everywhere, 13.6% of pay-TV households
consume authenticated streaming video content from their MVPD, according to the Q3 2015 Digital Video
Benchmark report by Adobe Digital Index. It is no exaggeration to state that the $400B television industry is
in transition to Internet delivery.

The stakes are high for the internet television market.

$400B television revenues are in transition to the Internet

$37B
$167B

$208B

Global

$15B
$76B

$89B

PUBLIC TV
US

AD-DRIVEN TV
PAY TV

The Path to OTT dominance

The Path to OTT dominance

The TV device landscape has changed as well and is vastly different compared with the early days of television.
In the 1970s, 70% of American households had one TV or less. Today, 65% have more than three. Add to that
the 6+ IP-enabled devices (PCs, tablets and smartphones) found in the average American home and most
households now possess nearly 10 screens. And in Europe, the numbers are even higher. The new math of the
multiple-TV and -device household has forced media companies to rethink their distribution strategies.

Clearly, TV consumption preferences and habits are changing, and viewers across all demographics not just
the oft-ballyhooed Millennialsare abandoning conventional TV at a rapid rate. Even baby boomers now get
20% of their TV and film content from a streaming source. According to a 2015 Conviva research study, overall
conventional TV consumption in the US declined by 7%. A similar study by Accenture reported an even steeper
global decline of 13% . Conventional TVs loss is IP-enabled
TV devices gain. In 2015, the viewing of TV and film content
increased across all non-conventional devices, and the jump
was far from marginal. Time spent viewing on tablets increased
by 91%; viewing on smartphones increased by 39%; viewing on
TV connected devices increased by 28% and viewing on PCs
increased by 9%.

YOY CHANGE IN VIEWING TIME SPENT BY DEVICE FOR AN AVERAGE WEEK (MAY 2014 - MAY 2015)
Source: Comparable Metrics: Q2 2015, Nielsen, Dec. 2015

% Increase or Decrease in Gross Minutes

TV devices, then and now

TV devices, then and now

100%

91%

80%
60%

39%

40%

28%

20%

9%

0%
-20%

-1%
Tablet
Video

Smartphone
Video

Connected TV
Devices

PC Video

TV

As more and more people take to their PCs, phones, tablets, game consoles and connected TV devices to
watch their favorite programming or live event, the industry has mobilized to accommodate them. Today,
practically every media company has a streaming offering. But while IP-delivered video is the new norm,
the quality is far from consistent across OTT offerings. And herein lies the biggest challenge for media
companies. Viewers not only expect to be able to watch their programs and films on any device, they want
the same or better quality that they experience with their conventional TVs.

TV quality and the overall viewing experience is quickly becoming the litmus test for video engagement and
loyalty. In a 2015 consumer study, Conviva found that 35% of viewers picked quality as the key consideration
when deciding on a streaming video service. Quality of experience (QoE), in fact, outranked all of the other
factors, including price, brand recognition and even breadth of content. In other words, to maximize
audience goals, services must provide a superior QoE.

WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN CHOOSING AN OTT SERVICE?

Source: Conviva 2015 Consumer Quality Report

Quality of Experience

35%

Amount of Content

32%

Price

Recognizable Brand

0%

23%

7%

20%

40%

Quality is now everything

Quality is now everything

Quality is now everything

Not only is QoE the key consideration for what viewers watch, its also quickly becoming the deciding factor
for how they watch and even whether they decide to stick with or abandon a particular program or service.
In its annual Video Experience Report (VXR), Conviva highlights the direct correlation between the quality of
the viewing experience and consumer engagement and churn. The report analyzed billions of consumer
streams to uncover the impact that a small (one percent) increase in video playback caused by buffering
would affect viewer engagement patterns. Buffering is usually caused by an issue in the delivery network
and typically causes the video to stop or slow while the stream catches up to the player. While it should
come as no surprise that people dont like buffering, what was surprising is how dramatically the intolerance
for it has grown over the five years covered by the VXR.

In 2011, Conviva determined that a one percent increase in buffering would reduce consumer viewing time
by three minutes. Four years later the expected loss of engagement has more than quintupled. Even more
concerning for media companies is the long-term effects on churn: in addition to watching less, 58.4% of
respondents said an interruption would make them less likely to watch or use the service in the future.

DELIVERY ISSUES LEAD TO ABANDONMENT

Source: Conviva 2015 Consumer Quality Report

ENGAGEMENT REDUCTION
(IN MINUTES)
WITH 1% INCREASE IN BUFFERING
2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

-3

HOW LIKELY ARE YOU TO WATCH

FROM THAT SAME PROVIDER AGAIN?

8%

6.6%

VERY LIKELY

LIKELY

MINS

-8

MINS

33.6%

-11

MINS

-14

MINS

VERY
UNLIKELY

-16

MINS

24.8%
UNLIKELY

24.6%

UNCHANGED

58.4%
CHURN RISK

IP-delivered videoin all of its different instantiationsis here to stay. To attract and retain viewers, media
companies not only have to offer great programming, they also must ensure coverage and broadcast
quality across every device. The Internet, as it turns out, wasnt built for streaming HD video or multimedia
of any kind. What it was made for was sending small packets of information that could be asynchronously
re-assembled into text messages on a green and black screen, not massive multimedia files that need to be
loaded simultaneously and displayed smoothly in millions of vibrant colors.

While technological advances in everything from microprocessing to

broadband and media encoding have made the streaming
of HD-quality video possible, it has not given media
companies any more control over the Internet. Video
quality is determined by many factors, including
the traffic and peering arrangements of individual
Internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery
networks (CDNs) that are outside of media companies
influence. What the media companies and OTT
providers can control is the playback platform and the
quality of the stream to the player or device. But even
that is unavoidably complicated,
especially when considering
the multiplicity of factors that
go into optimizing the stream
for just one player and device.
Now, multiply that by a growing
number of devices and players
and the challenges of full
coverage seems to approach a
level of dizzying complexity.

The Ineternet was not made for IP-delivered video

The Internet was not made for IP-delivered video

Fortunately, these challenges are solvable.

In the following sections, well explore and evaluate the OTT platform and QoE solutions available today
and provide some recommendations and examples of how OTT services can combine the best of them to
maximize their audience metrics, by providing consumers with fully-optimized coverage across the widest

Solving for delivery often leaves quality out of the equation

number of players and devices.

Solving for delivery often leaves quality out of the equation

Popular OTT services like Crackle, HBO, Netflix and Amazon all provide their viewers with a simple and
seamless experience that contributes greatly to their success. But that simplicity hides the difficult, and
expensive-to-replicate, investment of time and resources that it took to deliver that experience. Streaming
video over an IP-enabled device is an inherently complicated business. It not only requires technology
stacks for media ingesting, encoding and, of course, playback, it also needs others for managing content
and customers. As a business, it must also be able to generate and capture advertiser and or subscriber
revenue, as well as increase those revenues through the integration of sales and marketing analytics and
optimization.

Until recently, the playback platform and QoE choices available to most OTT service providers invariably
included some kind of compromise, in terms of control, coverage or quality, or a combination of the three.

Lets quickly take a look at those options and their respective advantages and limitations.

While the idea of building your own playback platform is tempting

from a quality and control perspective, the difficulty and expense of doing it
successfully have been well documented. With a few exceptions, the technological
expertise and experience required is outside the skillset of most in-house teams. Even
the companies that manage to acquire the required capabilities and solve the complexities
of multi-device playback are still left with an incomplete solution. To the playback stack
there must be added modules for content encoding and management, rights management
and protection, advertising, monetization and marketing. Because each of these capabilities
involve their own workflows and ways of structuring data and information, the challenges of
integration and normalizing data across all stacks grow more complex and expensive with
each addition.

Going it alone

Going it alone

Toward a more complete solution

Toward a more complete solution

The unified OTT platform

As OTT continues to grab a bigger share of overall TV revenues, the ability to go to market quickly with an OTT
service will only grow in importance. As weve reviewed, the streaming services that have had the most success
are the ones that are able to monetize the widest possible audience at the highest level of quality and device
coverage. Replicating that successat market speedsrequires an advanced, integrated multi-stack OTT
platform that precludes building it yourself or cobbling it together from multiple existing pieces. Fortunately,
the need for a unified solution has not been lost on the industry, and a few have risen to the challenge. But
not all unified platforms are equal or offer the same level of capabilities or services. When evaluating an OTT
platform, its important to ensure that they at least offer the following capabilities.

The Internet is an experiment in controlled chaos, and the absence of a true video standard leaves content
providers with a multitude of players, platforms and protocols on which to develop. When choosing a
platform, look for one with an adaptive HLS player and a developer-friendly SDK toolkit. The combination
will make it easier to customize and deliver a seamless viewing experience across the greatest number of
connected TV devices, tablets, smartphones and game consoles.

Unlock pay TV content on any device

Pay-TV subscribers expect to access their programming from any IP-enabled device. Selecting a platform
with an authentication capability enables subscriber verification and entitlement management across all
pay-TV sites and apps, netting higher customer satisfaction as well as a potential source of new ad revenues.

Monetize audiences across every screen

OTT services provide an exciting opportunity to generate additional ad revenues. Ensuring the OTT platform
can accommodate client and server-side dynamic ad insertion for VOD, linear and live video content permits
seamless TV-like ad experiences with no buffering or playback errors. Also validate the solution can isolate
experience metric issues in real-time to retain audience.

Protect your content

The profitability of OTT services has been built on the back of strong, and hard won, intellectual property
protections. The chosen platform should also include a scalable and robust digital rights management
(DRM) capability. One with a variety of license delivery methods which affords safe publications of digital
content and leverages full device coverage to monetize the widest possible audience.

Toward a more complete solution

Deliver TV Everywhere

Advanced QoE monitoring and optimization

Advanced QoE monitoring and optimization

While OTT providers have ready access to their own audience and engagement metrics telling them whos
watching what and for how long, they have very little insight into the reasons why the numbers are what
they are, nor how they measure up to other competitors in the space. With broadcast
programming, a drop in views, for example, can be directly attributed
to content or scheduling. But with OTT content, so many other
experiential factorsISP traffic, start time, buffering, and
otherscome into play that its impossible to make the
same inference without data to benchmark the viewing
experience. Likewise, those benchmarks are only valuable
when compared to industry numbers, which create the
necessary context to understand how good the viewing
experience really is.

Until recently, the QoE metrics that could complete the story
have been one-dimensional, difficult to obtain on an actionable
basis, and nearly impossible to normalize across the range of
devices, players and platforms. But today, thanks to a handful
of vendors, businesses have access to multi-dimensional QoE
solutions that not only can monitor each stream in real time
for over a hundred experience metrics but also normalize and
correlate the data with engagement and audience KPIs for the most
complete picture. Providers can also access a rich library of current
aggregated metrics to place their own results into the context of the
market at large. But, again, a wide gap in capabilities separates some
vendors from the others. When evaluating video QoE solutions, you
want them at a minimum to be able to provide the following.

A true measure of the viewers experience goes well beyond the quality of the picture on the screen or
fidelity of the audio coming from the speakers. To get an accurate picture, you to need to track somewhere
between 130 and 140 individual KPIs, and capture everything from engagement metrics, such as video
completion rate, to experience metrics, such as startup time and buffering ratio
across multiple dimensions, including device, ISP, CDN, location, and
content and format type. These then must be easily correlated
to the audience metrics that are at the heart of running a
successful service. This provides the historical and real-time
data needed to benchmark the QoE metrics for each device,
player and platform and give every viewer the best TV
experience possible.

Correlate experience with engagement and

audience metrics for better business decisionmaking
The metrics for experience, engagement and audience dont exist
in a vacuum. When you can connect the dots between audience,
engagement and experience, you get the comprehensive view of your
content, affiliates, CDN partners and other variables needed to make the important
strategic decisions about your business.

Provide actionable intelligence to pre-empt problems

Even when a QoE solution claims to have real-time data capabilities, a sudden spike in traffic can cripple
its ability to deliver on it. Make sure your solution has the proven ability to scale, so even when the traffic
reaches millions of streams you can still capture and analyze the data, and source and solve the issues
before they become problems.

Advanced QoE monitoring and optimization

Deliver a clearer picture of your viewers experience, across multiple dimensions

Conviva & Adobe Primetime: The benefits of integration

Conviva and Adobe Primetime: The benefits of integration

Adobe Primetime
When Turner Broadcasting came to Adobe in 2009 with the idea for TV Everywhere, there were
few other companies in existence, if any, with the technological experience and
capabilities to make the ambitious project a reality. The result of that
collaboration was the Emmy-award-winning Adobe Pass, now
Adobe Primetime authentication. It enables pay-TV subscribers
to access live, linear and VOD content on any IP-enabled
device. Through Adobe Primetime, billions of global
viewers have been able to share in the enjoyment of
premier events like the Olympics, the Academy Awards,
and Super Bowl XLIX as well as their favorite regular
programming on their own time and terms. Today,
Adobe Primetime is widely recognized as the industrys
premier OTT platform solution. Even OTT pioneers,
such as MLBAM and Turner Broadcasting, recognize
Adobes advanced capabilities and leverage Primetime to
insert ads, provide authentication and DRM, power playback
and live streams and ensure consistent coverage across more
than 400 devices.

With Primetime, OTT service providers not only get the most advanced and
device-compatible live, linear and VOD player but also a fully integrated stack to
leverage existing broadcast workflows and monetize, run and optimize their business.

ENGAGEMENT
MEASUREMENT

EXPERIENCE
MEASUREMENT

COMPREHENSIVE INFORMATION

Experience directly supports top-line business goals

Conviva
Like Adobe Primetime, Conviva possesses a technological and experiential edge that has made it the leading
provider of Experience Management solutions, and choice of premier content providers like Sony, HBO, ESPN,
CBS and Sky. Through its services, Conviva analyzes more than 4 billion streams per month on 1.6 billion unique
devices, giving its users unparalleled intelligence of what is going on around the globe and how its affecting video
performance over the Internet. By recording detailed real-time information on each viewer for every session,
OTT providers not only get insight into what is happening but the intelligence and tools to preemptively fix issues
before it affects viewership.

What can Conviva and Adobe Primetime do?

Adobe Primetimes integration with Conviva creates a new standard for OTT platforms. To Primetimes capability
of creating a video business for any device, Convivas QoE stack adds the ability to instantly diagnose issues and
enable service resiliency.

What can Conviva and Adobe Primetime do?

AUDIENCE
MEASUREMENT

What can Conviva and Adobe P rimetime do?

VIDEO APPLICATION

Adobe PrimeTime
Player

Conviva PrimeTime
Client Library

Internet

Collects Adobe
PrimeTime video
quality data and ships it
to Conviva Platform

Conviva
Platform
Ingests incoming
video quality data and
computes end-user
Conviva Pulse metrics

Get instant and actionable QoE metrics for every device covered by Primetime
For the unified solution, Conviva and Adobe worked hand-in-hand to develop a pre-integrated set of
libraries that work automatically with any Primetime supported device, protocol or system be it Android,
iOS, Flash or whatever comes next. As such, Conviva works out-of-the-box to give you comprehensive QoE
metrics on the more the 400 devices covered by Primetime.

Compare and contrast performance across devices, platforms and systems

While Convivas code extracts information from each stream and device on a granular level, the
From day one,

data is normalized before being transmitted back to the Conviva platform. With Conviva,

Convivas mandate

you can confidently compare and contrast and benchmark QoE metrics across

has been to provide the

best experience possible

devices, systems and platforms, for a truer gauge of volume and business
performance than otherwise possible.

for our OTT service providers.

Complementing Adobe Primetimes
goal of providing the best solution
for end-to-end services, Conviva together
with Adobe helps our mutual service providers
dominate the market by deploying optimized OTT
solutions with greater agility and a wider device
reach.
Dr. Hui Zhang, Founder and
Chief Executive Officer
Conviva

Expedite time-to-market
Even with a developer-friendly SDK, the development cycle
for new device coverage could take a development team 6-8
weeks to complete. The Conviva pre-integrated package for
Primetime comes out of the box ready for testing, eliminating the
need for development, and can be ready for production in typically
one week or less, once testing is complete.

Challenge
Crackle had added an array of new, quality programming offerings
but deliverability issues were limiting full viewer
engagement.

Case Study: Sony Crackle

Sony Crackle: leveraging the Adobe-Conviva partnership to

deliver a better viewing experience across all screens

Solution
The combination of Primetime and Conviva gives
Crackle unparalleled control over the viewing
experience. Primetime allows Crackle to deliver and
manage content across more than 400 devices. With
Conviva, Crackle can monitor the quality of each
stream and correlate engagement with experience.

Results
With the unified Primetime-Conviva solution, Crackle was able to increase quality and user engagement
and get the correlated experience and audience metrics it needed to make more informed editorial and
marketing decisions.

82% improvement in buffering ratio

50% increase in average bitrate

2-8 minute increase in time watched per viewer

Its imperative for us to understand our audiences behavior and

ensure their experience is of the highest quality. As such, Crackle
relies on Conviva [and Adobe] to provide data on and to optimize
the quality of that viewer experience and ensure continued
engagement with our content.

Daniel Sanders
VP Technology,
Chief Software Architect
Sony Crackle

Conclusion

Adobe Primetime and Conviva allow OTT providers to

deliver the video quality customers now demand
As IP-delivered video continues to take screen time away from conventional
TV, viewers will increasingly expect and demand better quality from their
OTT providers. Adobe Primetime has clearly separated itself from other OTT
platforms with its breadth of device coverage and range of complementary
capabilities. By partnering with Conviva, Adobe can now give OTT providers
a way to close the gap between what is possible and what can be delivered
on a unified platform.

Adobe Primetime
has always valued
Conviva for bringing
quality of experience front1

Nielsen, Total Audience Report (2015)

US Statistical Abstract, 1980

User Survey Analysis: Gartner

Consumer Insights People

at Work and Play in 2014
4

eMarketer (2015)

Accenture, Digital Video and the

Connected Consumer

and-center when delivering OTT

services. With this partnership, both
Adobe and Conviva can serve our joint
customers better by bringing their service
to market faster while maximizing quality and
engagement.
Campbell Foster
Director of Product Marketing
Adobe Primetime

# EXPERIENCE EXCELLENCE
2015 by Conviva. All rights reserved. www.conviva.com

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