Case Study: Latin American vMVPD

A Conviva customer, who is a Latin American Virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (vMVPD), provides a best-in-class digital entertainment experience through the acquisition, production, and distribution of unique and exclusive content; superior customer service; and the continuous deployment of leading-edge technologies for digital entertainment.

The vMVPD operates in nine countries—Argentina, Barbados, Chile, Colombia, Curaçao, Ecuador, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay—and is a top provider of digital entertainment services in South America and the Caribbean, with more than 10 million subscribers and close to 9,000 employees in 11 countries across the region.

Challenge

Before the vMVPD’s content curation and engagement teams had access to Conviva’s continuous measurement analytics platform, they were struggling to find the data they needed to make important programming, marketing, and UI decisions. They identified four main areas of opportunity in which they needed Conviva’s support:

• Diversifying consumption of live sports viewers: Live sports were a driver of application engagement, but viewing was not consistent. They needed to better convert sports viewers into viewers of additional content on off-days and offseasons.
• Improving viewer experience to drive viewing time: Programming content carousels was an important responsibility of these teams, but they lacked a way to personalize them for different types of viewers or measure how efficiently they were converting to actual consumption.
• Regional marketing and experience: The vMVPD operates in nine different countries and needed insight into viewer behaviors for each region.
• Trial-to-subscriber conversion: Free trials are an important part of their growth strategy, but they wanted to ensure they were converting trial users as effectively as possible.

Solution

When the vMVPD’s engagement, marketing, and programming teams gained access to Conviva, they recognized that data could not only help them to make better decisions, but it was also a valuable tool in helping them measure the success of these decisions. The team operationalized Conviva’s data solutions and leveraged insights to increase minutes watched per viewer, boost content diversity consumed per viewer, improve marketing tactics, and optimize their application flow.

Diversifying consumption of live sports viewers

To tackle the challenge of better engaging sports-only viewers, the marketing team first created segmentation of their soccer fans and conducted an analysis of those who had been subscribers for two years or more. They evaluated what the long-time subscribers watched other than soccer using content pathing capabilities. The team uncovered a surprising affinity between soccer and an action series that was in their back catalog.

Then, they developed tactics to engage newer subscribers with the content now identified as relevant to them. They utilized Conviva’s audience segmentation to identify the group of viewers watching soccer and no other content, and they deployed tactics like push notifications and email campaigns to promote the action show to these viewers.

They were then able to measure which tactic was most effective at converting viewers. The team also promoted the action show and a new show of a similar genre during soccer games, feeling confident this was the most relevant content to leverage in those promo spots.

Results

Ultimately, this was a success. After the email and push campaign, they saw a 15% lift in viewing for the action show. Year over year, their subscriber drop-off after the season ended decreased by 10%.

Overall, they saw a 25% increase in engagement as measured by minutes spent on the platform per viewer.

Improving viewer experience to drive viewing time

In-app content carousels are an important means of discovery for users, and the vMVPD’s programming team wanted to understand how well they promoted content in these valuable spots.

In January 2021, they curated a themed carousel with travel and vacation movies and series. They were able to tag content and then pull reports to see which shows were discovered through the carousel and how much engagement (in minutes per viewer) they were able to capture. They tested different carousel positions to see which correlated with actual viewership the best. They were also able build different carousels for different audience segments, surfacing content that was most engaging for the specific audience.

Results

The team was ultimately able to improve view-through rates from the carousel by 20% by identifying the most impactful spots for carousels and creating playlists curated to specific audience segments.

Regional marketing and experience

Since the vMVPD operates in nine different countries, understanding viewership data is important in building experiences that are relevant to viewers in each region. One way they have been able to do this is by recognizing that one country has higher consumption on mobile devices and lower consumption on tablets than other regions. They were also able to see what quality expectations existing in each country through SPI benchmarking and what types of shows or sports viewers were joining their platform to watch in each country.

This helped them decide how to invest in their application development, especially which devices would be most important in their key markets and what content to market most heavily.

Results

Ultimately, this helped drive better customer adoption and usage in their newest markets, growing their audience by 60% in the first year after they began leveraging Conviva.

Trial-to-subscriber conversion

With growth as a key KPI for the team’s success, paying attention to free-trial conversion was very important. To do this, the team wanted to focus on best practices for converting free trials to subscriptions.

The team used their Conviva data to identify what content free-trial viewers were watching and promoted this content on their free-access pages. They tracked what type of content viewers watched the most of during trials, including live versus VOD, total minutes, and completion rates to better project conversion rates. They identified behaviors of the converted viewers audience segment, which they were able to use to program their content carousels and improve their marketing strategies during the trial period.

Results

They saw 40% subscriber growth year over year after implementing these data-driven strategies.