Data Reporting & Visualization for OTT

Sai Naresh
mobiotics
Published in
9 min readAug 13, 2021

Data Reporting and Visualization is a relatively new concept that provides many possibilities for businesses to improve customer experience. It can also be used in OTT in conjunction with video reporting software to analyse how customers are watching videos and what they’re viewing the most. With this information, companies can make adjustments accordingly and offer more relevant content to viewers.

With more companies than ever investing in video, there is increasing demand for updated income reporting metrics.

Data Reporting & Visualization for OTT

What is Data Reporting?

Data reporting is the process of collecting and formatting raw data and translating it into a digestible format to assess the ongoing performance of your organization. A company’s data reporting often summarizes financial information such as revenues, accounts receivables, and net profits. Data reporting helps you track what’s happening to your business and evaluate its performance. It’s the process of collecting, merging, and visualizing raw data from all available sources. Most often, data is presented in the form of tables, graphs, or charts.

How to Write a Data Report?

  • Understanding customer churn — Since there are many OTT players, providers' choice also increases for the customer. Customer churn is a real problem to solve and maintain profitability in the OTT universe. Big data analytics gives OTT providers the capacity to aggregate disparate data sets and develop a 360-degree customer view.
  • Define The Type Of Your Data Report — What types of data reporting do you need to present? Having this definition ahead of time will help set parameters you can easily stick to. Here are the most common data report types — Informational vs. analytical, Recommendation/justification report, Investigative report, Compliance report, Feasibility report, Research studies report, Periodic report, KPI report, Yardstick report
  • Know Your Target Audience — Knowing your audience will help determine what data you present, the recommendations you make, and how you present the data.
  • Have A Detailed Plan And Select Your KPIs — Choose KPIs that align directly with your specific business aims, and you will benefit from a cohesive mix of visual benchmarks that will help you track your progress accurately.
  • Be Objective, When Possible — A good business data report describes the past, present, or possible future situation objectively and neutral. Objective means the report states facts, not an opinion. Keep the opinions minimal.
  • Be Visually Stunning — Analytics presented visually make it easier for decision-makers to grasp difficult concepts or identify new patterns. Data presented visually are easier for humans to perceive and digest. Reports should include data visualizations over text whenever possible.
  • Have Content Sharply Written — While the focus should be on visuals, some data report types also need text, Make sure your reports use persuasive and even-toned business writing, Use concise, active, and engaging language. Use bullet points versus long paragraphs.
  • Make Sure the Report Is Actionable — Prescriptive, descriptive, and predictive analytics are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. Each brings new insights needed to make better business decisions and increase ROI.
  • Keep It Simple And Don’t Be Misleading — While data should be objective, formatting, filtering, and manipulation can be easily part of misleading statistics. Make sure you are being consistent and reliable with your reporting.

What is Data Visualisation?

Data visualization is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data is numerous. You need the ability to chart, graph, and plot your data. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, a visual is worth a thousand data points. A key aspect of our ability to understand what’s going on is to look for patterns, and these patterns are often not evident when we simply look at data in tables. The right visualization will help you gain a deeper understanding in a much quicker timeframe.

Importance of Data Visualization

Data visualization is essential to assist businesses in quickly identifying data trends, which would otherwise be a hassle. The pictorial representation of data sets allows analysts to visualize concepts and new patterns. With the increasing surge in data every day, making sense of the quintillion bytes of data is impossible without Data Proliferation, which includes data visualization.

A dashboard, graph, infographics, map, chart, video, slide, etc. all these mediums can be used for visualizing and understanding data. Visualizing the data enables decision-makers to interrelate the data to find better insights and reap the importance of data visualization: Analysing the Data in a Better Way, Faster Decision Making, and Making Sense of Complicated Data.

Key 15 metrics to track with Visualization Reports in OTT Platform.

  1. Monthly Active Users (MAU) —Monthly Active Users (MAU) is the number of unique users who have opened your app or engaged with your OTT service in the past month. MAU provides an overview of the health of your business.
  2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) — Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the amount of money a customer is expected to spend with you during their lifetime.
  3. Conversion Rate (CR) — Conversion Rate is the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors.
  4. Churn Rate — Churn Rate is the percentage of your customers that leave your service over a given period. It can be calculated by dividing the number of customers you lost during that period (for example, Q3) by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that time period.
  5. Engagement — Engagement measures user interaction with your website or apps. Common metrics can include how many times a user opens an app, how many videos they’re watching per session, and what actions a user takes within one of your digital properties.
  6. Inactive users — Inactive users are those who were active in the past, but have since become inactive. Why did they leave your app? And what type of retargeting efforts should you take? A disinterested user may sign up to watch content for a few weeks before abandoning your service for another. Weekly emails or push notifications from your app promoting content they may be interested in could re-engage them.
  7. Device viewership — Where are people watching? These days, desktop computers are being used less frequently for viewing live streams, while mobile and OTT devices (like ROKU and Apple TV) are becoming more prevalent. Knowing how your viewers are watching helps you know what to focus on in your broadcast.
  8. Duration of views — How long are people watching your live stream? Is the average churn for, say, a 2-hour event three minutes, 20 minutes, or more than 60 minutes? Low streaming duration could indicate that the quality of your content needs work, or that you’re not reaching the right viewing audience.
  9. Subscriber Return on Investment (ROI) — Subscriber Return on Investment metric measures how much profit is received from each subscriber. ROI helps subscription businesses understand the true nature of their growth and if it’s sustainable.
  10. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) — Monthly Recurring Revenue is the predictable revenue a business can expect on a monthly basis; includes all invoiced recurring charges, credits, and refunds from active subscriptions. Significance of MRR is Often considered one of the most valuable metrics for a digital media subscription business, this metric can help answer questions like: When compared to previous months, what is the growth trajectory of my business?, How is customer acquisition or churn impacting my revenue?
  11. Lifetime Value (LTV) — LTV is an estimate of the profit made from the average customer over the period that they remain a customer (from signup to churn). Customer lifetime value is an important metric as it represents the upper limit on how much you should spend to acquire new customers. It helps digital publishing businesses make key business decisions related to sales, marketing, and other important investments.
  12. Network Experience — Monitoring network metrics such as Connection latency, Byte sent/received for ISP performance.
  13. Data monitoring — Monitoring error patterns, missing logs, unexpected nulls, malformed JSONs etc.
  14. Customer Experience — Detect customer issues proactively by monitoring video playback errors, load time etc.
  15. Total number of individuals watching a specific program or platform

So in a nutshell, a deeper understanding of your users (thanks to your user data) will help you make smarter decisions to improve your bottom line.

How applying data reports and visualizations helps OTT businesses

  • Helps to identify trends to stay competitive
  • Increases the productivity and dedication of staff in handling core tasks and issue
  • Promotes low-risk data-driven action plans
  • Identifies and acts upon opportunities
  • Promotes low-risk data-driven action plans
  • Validates decisions
  • Facilitates sensible recruitment of talent
  • Helps in selecting the target audience

To understand how reports and visualizations help in your analysis, below are few segments in reporting wherein it helps to understand the use cases for OTT — Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour, Conversion.

  • Audience report for OTT — Key Metrics Description for New and Returning Users KPI performance through Custom Report
  • Acquisition report for OTT — Subscription Trend based on source/medium
  • Behaviour report for OTT — For every OTT platform, it is necessary to understand the dates and time of the day during which the content is consumed the most and the trend in which this gets followed. In few reports, even though we have all the fields in place, to have a clear understanding of those in the UI, it’s difficult to understand and requires a lot of processes.
  • Conversion report for OTT — Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) — ARPU is a metric used majorly by digital media, and networking firms, defined as the total revenue divided by the number of subscribers.

Benefits of Data Visualization Tools

  • Solves data inefficiencies and absorb vast amounts of data presented in a visual format
  • Increases the speed of decision making
  • Identifies errors and inaccuracies in data quickly
  • Access real-time information and assist in management function
  • It promotes storytelling and conveys the right message to the audience
  • Explore business insights and achieve business goals in the right direction
  • Stay on top of the game by discovering the latest trends
  • Optimize and instantly retrieve data via tailor-made reports

Behaviour reporting in OTT Platform

  • Funnels — Track user flows and drops off points in your dashboard with funnel analysis
  • Cohorts — Compare how different user groups behave over time in onboarding, registration, purchasing, and uninstalling
  • Insights — Discover the patterns with customizable analytics to better understand your users
  • Uninstall tracking — Measure app uninstalls to easily understand retention rate
  • Pivots — Spot key data insights by visualizing hotspots and trends without needing a team of data scientists
  • Flows — Visualize how users navigate your app to identify critical paths to conversion and opportunities for improvement
  • Rich user profiles — Get a comprehensive, real-time view of any user aggregated from all touchpoints.

Introducing our Data Reporting & Visualization Software called — vAnalytics

Big Data Analytics Process.

vAnalytics offers — Custom OTT Data Reporting and Visualization, which is a Scalable, flexible Big Data Analytics Service to unify data sources and to process, query, visualize, report, alert, and mine OTT Data.

Here are the features of our vAnalytics product.

  • Unify different OTT data sources to form a Data lake including RDBMS, Analytics Data, Event Streams, Logs Files, and any other types.
  • Generic Query Layer and API for creating data tables, issuing general and custom queries, generating reports, and computing aggregate metrics.
  • Analytics SDK for multiple device platforms and Event Streaming layer to process and route data.
  • Setup Batch Jobs for reporting in the desired format and also for creating intermediate tables for visualization.
  • Set up thresholds for different data points to get Alerts about critical issues and events that need attention.
  • Detailed Metrics and Reports including queries, alerts, and data storage details.
  • Scalable and reliable SAAS built on AWS Cloud and Lambda. 24x7 Maintenance and Monitoring.

Coming to an end.

The world is forwarding technology towards a more connected future, and OTT Big data and report visualization play a big part in the automation and development of AI technologies. Many companies are already using Machine Learning processes for greater accuracy in delivering their services. As the world with technologies around the globe becomes more synchronous and interoperable, Data will be the significant one to which connects them. Therefore, companies using big data solutions need to keep up with its evolving nature while those still reluctant to invest should rethink their organizational policies.

Looking to launch Data Reporting and visualizations for your organization? Mobiotics can get you all of that.

Click here to book a 15 Min demo with us to know how vAnalytics works.

For more information about our product and services please feel free to get in touch with us

Call us at +91 9620209869, or write an email to the sales@mobiotics.com

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