14 Nov What benefits does the QoE measure bring to publishers?

Yes, QoE has benefits for advertisements

As most people spent more time at home, streaming services had experienced growth during the pandemic. In fact, the time spent streaming increased by almost 75% in 2020, according to a Nielsen study. The good news is that this trend has been steady during these two years. Moreover, consumers today have a lot of choices in video entertainment. It is estimated that there are over 5,300 streaming services globally and new players continue to enter the market.

In such a competitive environment, user experience is increasingly crucial to business viability and media companies are aware of this. It is vital to keep satisfaction levels high and this kind of company should be focused on the customer experience.

Ads increasing

One of the consequences of the growth in the use and popularity of streaming services is that advertisement spending in this area has also increased considerably.

Streaming TV advertising is those that run within TV content watched through an internet-connected device rather than ads you may see on traditional linear television. It is important to notice that these streaming service ads could appear before or during streaming TV content found on ad-supported networks and apps.

From a business perspective, these kinds of investments have significant benefits. We can find:

• It’s a great way to connect with a mass audience.
• It can allow brands to micro-target audience segments.
• It can help advertisers target strong demographics.
• It will enable advertisers to review advanced data analytics and feedback from audiences

As some studies have found, viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in video format, compared to only 10% when they read it in a text format. Because of that, placing video ads on a streaming platform can help companies to increase their brand recognition. At the same time, this kind of advertisement could influence more onto viewers to consider a brand the next time they’re in the market for a product or service.

Improving QoE in streaming services

However, a global survey of 200 streaming service provider executives revealed some points of improvements in streaming services. The conclusions of this survey can be found in “Go with the stream” report. When asked how they rate their service’s quality of experience (QoE) and features from a consumer perspective, most executives of streaming companies said their services are “good” (43%) or “acceptable” (33%). Only 20% of executives believed their service to be as good as global streaming giants.

We have already seen why QoE is important from a consumer perspective. But it has also big implications for the brands who want to advertise on any platform and, for that, has a lot of repercussions for the economic viability of any streaming services.

Why the QoE is important from the advertisement perspective? Because the environment in which an ad is served is as important as the quality of the ad itself. At the same time, a survey conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoppers states that almost two-thirds of respondents (63%) said they’d be willing to see more ads if it meant a lower subscription cost. When asked if they would prefer to see fewer ads that “aren’t interesting to me,” 72% agreed. This suggests consumers expect ads to be as relevant as the content they’ve chosen to watch, an expectation that poses challenges for streaming services, ad creators, and brands.

Another survey from Verizon Digital Media Services found that the average time spent viewing video fell by a staggering 77% when the quality of a video was poor. This substantiates what we already know: viewers are only compelled to watch and interact with your videos and brand when the quality is high. Today’s consumer expectations are high, it is unlikely your audience is going to consume anything less than HD quality. If a streaming services provider doesn’t offer a good QoE, perhaps businesses don’t want to place any ads in that company.

Always remember that high quality equates to better performance. Better performance results in more leads and higher conversions.

Algorithms to the rescue

Video ads are so important that IEEE has published a paper where it proposed a novel model for inserting advertisements into online videos that considers the content and commercial-specific properties while optimizing Quality of Experience (QoE) by estimating suitable duration for advertisement, number of splits, and content relation.

The proposed model has been evaluated in a controlled on-line video test environment so that the success rate of this platform has been compared with the advertisement insertion strategies of technology frontrunners YouTube and Vimeo. In terms of medium and long-length online videos, advertisements located within the content provides a better QoE compared to the ones that are located at the beginning of the video.

This model considers the advertisement campaign parameters such as content duration, advertisement duration, user’s total watch session, and the number of stitched advertisements. Finally, the algorithm provides a decision mechanism that calculates QoE according to the position and frequency of the advertisements that are going to be stitched into the content regarding the total watch session duration for a user.