AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Bringing Data Insights to Content Providers with Synamedia Clarissa on AWS
By Amruta Shankar, Director, Data and Analytics – Synamedia
By Josh Hart, Principal Solutions Architect, ISV – AWS
By Kevin Yao, Principal Partner Solutions Architect, M&E – AWS
 |
| Synamedia |
 |
The world of video entertainment is more competitive than ever. With the rise of streaming platforms, viewers have more choice when it comes to on-demand movies and shows. For content providers to stand out in this crowded landscape, they must deeply understand user behavior and optimize the content experience.
That’s where Synamedia Clarissa comes in. Clarissa helps TV providers, content owners, and streaming services unlock insights about their video content and viewer engagement.
Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Clarissa delivers data-driven content insights and recommendations to help businesses boost viewer satisfaction. This post explores how Clarissa leverages the analytics capabilities of AWS to surface impactful data insights for content providers.
Synamedia is an AWS Specialization Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller with the Media and Entertainment (M&E) Competency. It’s a leading video technology provider that addresses the needs for premium video service providers and direct-to-consumer (D2C) with a comprehensive solution portfolio.
Synamedia solutions spread across several pillars such as video networks, TV platforms, advertisement and monetization, and content protection and piracy disruption.
Enabling Business Users Through Data Insights
Synamedia designed Clarissa from the ground up to analyze video consumption, content discovery, and user experiences. Clarissa provides a bridge between traditional linear TV and the growing number of streaming options, like advertising-based video on demand (AVOD), free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST), and subscription video on demand (SVOD).
Clarissa’s core purpose is to empower users with data-driven insights. The solution focuses on media companies’ content and product teams who make decisions around programming, content promotion, and user experience.
Clarissa provides these business stakeholders with insights centered around the two critical aspects of service performance: content insights and app insights.
Content insights
These insights provide a deep drill-down into content performance at an individual, channel, box set, and VOD provider level. They help identify which content is resonating with viewers and performing well.
This module allows customers to have top-level reporting on what content is or isn’t working across the service, but also allows you to drill down for a granular content level analysis to determine how much of the content was watched, on which device, and in what viewing mode (live, on-demand, time-shifted).
App Insights
These provide insights on the navigation and content discovery journeys users make on the platform. Discovering content to consume focuses on the entity of the user journey and helps business stakeholders answer key questions, such as:
- How long did it take the user to discover this content?
- Did the discovery journey impact the duration of the subsequent viewing session?
- Why are some journeys more likely to result in better content engagement than others?
Solution Architecture
A key component of Clarissa’s capabilities is the underlying serverless architecture. Clarissa uses serverless AWS services wherever possible to ingest, process, and analyze large volumes of viewer data. Serverless technologies feature automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-use billing model to increase agility and optimize costs. 
Figure 1 – Clarissa high-level AWS architecture.
Some of the core AWS components that power Clarissa include:
- AWS Lambda: Lets you run code in a serverless compute environment. Clarissa’s data processing code and algorithms run on Lambda, which allows the application to automatically scale to handle varying viewer behavior and large data volumes.
- Amazon Kinesis: This is a fully-managed service for ingesting and processing streaming data in real-time. Clarissa uses Kinesis for streaming data ingestion from video apps and platforms. It provides near-real-time data feeds to power Clarissa’s insights.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service: Amazon S3 is a durable object storage service used for Clarissa’s data lake.
- Amazon QuickSight: A fully-managed business intelligence (BI) service that provides modern interactive dashboards, reports, and natural language queries, QuickSight offers interactive dashboards that are embedded into the Clarissa SaaS application. These support natural language processing (NLP) queries that help non-data teams make data-driven decisions. Using machine learning-powered insights allows content owners to make informed decisions, without having to rely on data teams to create bespoke reports.
By moving customers from their incumbent BI tool to Amazon QuickSight, Clarissa allows for data-driven decision-making using natural language queries with Amazon Q which can generate rich narratives using QuickSight’s generative BI capabilities. This has democratized data availability to every team that wants to become data-led and insight-driven.
Clarissa customers typically spend up to 90 minutes per business day using Clarissa’s embedded dashboards. Clarissa customers noted the new interactive dashboards, powered by QuickSight, represent a significant step forward, improving both performance and usability.
Leveraging fully-managed AWS services, Clarissa focuses on its proprietary analytics capabilities rather than infrastructure operations such as provisioning and scaling. AWS analytics services provide the versatility to capture, store, and process billions of streaming viewer data points. This powers real-time and scalable video intelligence for Clarissa’s customers.
Understanding Viewer Behavior
The adage “content is king” still determines the success of any video platform—but when, where, and how subscribers watch content also matters.
Given the growing number of small and niche content players in the market, measuring content performance is becoming vital to understand every platform’s content unique-selling-point. For example, content providers can determine if the platform is the “home of major league sports” or a “destination for the next blockbuster original series.”
The first step to measuring content performance is defining the standard metrics for measuring views and activity on your platform. As a data-driven solution, Clarissa understands the need for configuring the service to provide data that’s aligned to your current and future reporting needs.
By providing a standard metric-oriented dataset conforming to corporate-wide data definitions that can be used across the business, Clarissa breaks through the typical data silos to generate consistent, reliable metrics, and insights that can be leveraged by multiple types of users. For example, a dashboard embedded within the Clarissa application using Amazon QuickSight is shown below.
Figure 2 – QuickSight dashboard embedded within the Clarissa SaaS application.
Customer Success Stories
The next generation of TV viewers are not bound by the tyranny of the linear schedule and live programming (with the exception of live sports). Enabling content to be available on-demand with the option of having a Cloud DVR (cDVR) becomes important for the stragglers. Measuring the reach of any asset on whether it was watched live, on-demand, or on cDVR is a useful metric for content owners.
Pay-TV operators see significant usage of Cloud DVR recording functionality. They’re often unsure how much of that recorded content is being watched, but as a subscriber-first solution, using Clarissa’s adoption analysis feature operators find that on average only 40% of the recorded content gets viewed.
Instead of increasing cDVR storage allocation to each household, operators can reduce capacity without having an adverse subscriber impact. The analysis is also able to highlight top content that is recorded vs. viewed and the content genres that dominate cDVR usage. This allows operators to tailor the availability of the cDVR feature to only the most relevant content.
Telco providers, on the other hand, are still dealing with the old world of recording on set-top boxes and the cost of having multiple tuners on the device. They invest time and effort to understand the need for expensive hardware on the box vs. offering the same functionality in the cloud as a cDVR service.
Telco providers can use the recording stream analysis feature of Clarissa to uncover how many concurrent recording streams viewers are accessing, and inform decisions about which new capabilities to include in their next generation of set-top-boxes.
Conclusion
In today’s on-demand world, media companies need to understand user behavior and preferences to stay competitive. Synamedia’s Clarissa provides the analytics capabilities to unlock those video content insights on AWS.
Clarissa delivers actionable data to content providers so they can optimize user experience and content performance in their applications. Clarissa helps drive higher viewer satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Media companies now have a powerful tool to experiment, iterate, and enhance their streaming video services.
For media brands looking to better monetize and engage audiences, the time is now to put viewer insights to work. Clarissa is available today via AWS Marketplace.
.
.
Synamedia – AWS Partner Spotlight
Synamedia is an AWS Specialization Partner and leading video technology provider that addresses the needs for premium video service providers and direct-to-consumer with a comprehensive solution portfolio.