Case study: Mola Soars from Jakarta to London with Conviva

Challenge

As Mola’s streaming business rocketed from Southeast Asia across Western Europe, they needed to break through the crowded streaming airspace over multiple continents. What’s more, the team could not be guided by the spotty quality of experience (QoE) data and viewer journey blind spots of today’s video analytics vendors.

The core issue is video measurement sensors and analytics solutions are often 30-year-old web technology retrofitted for streaming. But these are analog solutions in the digital age of streaming. The offerings show streaming events, such as video starts or stops, but these are mere snapshots that don’t capture the true streaming experience. Worse, this incomplete event-based data doesn’t inform what action to take on it.

Continuous measurement analytics, meanwhile, has video starts and stops, but everything in between to truly depict what the stream is like for every viewer in real-time. How this works is the Conviva sensor analyzes every second of the real-world viewing experience, then cleans and standardizes the measurement across hundreds of dimensions—all while the stream is still playing.

Mola enlisted Conviva as their co-pilot for a clear flight path forward fueled by continuous measurement analytics.

Solution

Performance benchmarking

What is acceptable rebuffering in Milan versus Kula Lumpur? How does bitrate vary in London compare to Singapore? Viewer expectations are varied across the globe. And as Mola charted their international expansion, the team first needed to baseline streaming performance in each market.

Mola first tapped into Conviva’s unmatched global footprint, spanning 4 billion sensors across 500 million+ viewers, to scoreboard what “normal” looks like in each area. Armed with Experience Benchmarks, Mola focused their streaming initiatives to trounce the performance benchmarks and delight their audiences with better experiences than incumbent streaming services delivered.

Conviva’s proprietary Streaming Performance Index (SPI) score analyzed QoE performance for Mola’s viewers at a global and local level. Fueled by these insights, Mola baselines how their streams are delivered on the two primary mobile operating systems: Android vs. iOS and identified improvement opportunities.

Mola teammates could intuitively see the big picture of their viewer experience, as well as the big picture’s small pixels to pinpoint areas of improvement to keep their audiences happy and acquire new ones. For example, the team applied Conviva’s deep-diving QoE metrics to surface needle-in-the-haystack insights competitors cannot. Mola trail-blazed streaming Euro Cup matches in 4K for the first time in Jakarta in Summer 2021. The tech ops teams continuously monitored the 4K roll-out globally but could also drill down to the individual 4K stream at the household level.

Deeper content discovery

How many of your viewers watched the last episode of Yellowstone and then abandoned? How many days lapsed from the Mola trial sign-up to actual subscriber conversion?

Traditional video analytics were ill-equipped to answer Mola’s more nuanced content consumption questions. Indeed, marketers fly blind worldwide as these costly programming and content decisions are made with limited information and disparate content and social data sets.

But since Conviva continuously collects QoE, content, social, and ad data from one sensor, Mola knows exactly which content is most valuable to what customers, measure impact in real-time, and optimize programming daily.

Netflix divvies up their global viewers into over 1,300 “taste communities” from health food versus anime obsessives, for example. So too, the Mola marketing team slices and dices their unique audience segments with endless granularity—unearthing what they watch, when they watch, and how they watch their content—to serve up even more tailored content recommendations. Mola then layers in subscription data to serve up the most relevant promotions for their distinct audiences.

Armed with these fine-grain audience insights, Mola executives understand how their audience segments watch—or don’t watch—content and then leverage the findings to enrich content strategies and grow viewer engagement for future events.

The marketing team optimizes subscription packaging, pricing, and promotional offers even further with a fine grain understanding of their viewer behavior. And Mola’s programmers count on the industry’s most trusted audience data from Conviva to make smarter data-backed content decisions, such as whether to renew or retire content.

Results

Despite entering fiercely competitive new markets, Mola has thrived in delivering quality streaming experiences to their customers the world over. Mola’s gains in viewership are aided by remarkable improvements in their stream performance.

Viewer time spent watching live streams, such as English Premier League matches, surged 19% and overall plays jumped 11% from August 2021 through February 2022.

The progress is even more striking by nation:

• In Indonesia, Mola’s performance across Android and iOS crush the SPI benchmark for the country. What’s more, the number of videos that failed to start in Indonesia plummeted 90% for live and VOD streams from November through February.
• Mola has also netted substantial QoE gains against the expected baseline in Malaysia and Singapore.
• In the United Kingdom, the percentage of videos that failed to start dipped two-thirds from November 2021 to February 2022.
• Within Italy, Mola realized whopping gains in Android (19%) and iOS (34%) against the SPI baseline by February 2022. And the number of live or VOD streams on Android that did not start shriveled to the lowest levels ever recorded.

Buoyed by the fine-grain analysis of Viewer Insights, Mola also surfaced and unearthed needle-in-the-haystack insights to refine their content and programing decisions. For example, even though Yellowstone led in show plays, the team uncovered that lesser-known series Rookie and Poldark commanded far longer viewing sessions. The team incorporated these findings to update their promotion strategies.

Learn more about how Conviva can integrate insights across your entire streaming business.