Streaming Video Strategies

Chapter 1. The Impact of Video in an Increasingly Digital World

When watching videos online, consumers expect an ideal viewing experience. It doesn’t matter what device they’re watching from or where in the world they are; people now expect the kinds of uninterrupted experiences they get from companies that specialize in streaming video, like Netflix and YouTube. Developers realize that their videos are being judged against these high standards.

Meeting those ever-increasing expectations means dealing with a formidable array of complex challenges, regardless of whether your company and engineering team are experienced with video or newer to the space. Indeed, even the giants in this space contend with these challenges: as a Forbes magazine tech reporter found, the streaming quality of a Netflix movie varies depending on the viewer’s web browser and player. Every browser, app, and device renders and supports video files (such as MP4 files) slightly differently, affecting streaming quality.

Viewer experience has become ever more crucial as video has become an essential tool for businesses. The statistics bear this out: today, 86% of businesses use video for marketing—and a staggering 92% of them see it as an important part of their marketing strategy. Among consumers, one survey found that 84% rely on video to inform their purchasing decisions, while 96% watch video to increase their understanding of a product or service.

Video works because it is captivating and easy to absorb. When viewers are offered a choice of ways to learn about the same topic, studies show that they are more likely to pick video—and those who do are far more likely to retain the message being conveyed. Video also keeps consumers engaged: users spend 88% more time on websites that contain video than on those that do not. The increasing availability of interactive features, like chatting about and “liking” a piece of video content while it’s streaming, has also helped increase engagement, according to HubSpot.

Jon Dahl, founder of Mux, reports that adults today spend a staggering one-third of their waking hours watching video, making it the top way people spend their time (after working and sleeping). The number of people who watch video online has almost doubled since 2018, and video now makes up 80% of the internet’s content (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. The growth of video on the internet, 2016–2021¹

These numbers give a sense of just how much opportunity businesses leave on the table if they don’t have a video business strategy.

The information presented in this report is designed to be useful to you in making decisions about building video at your company—whether you are a founder or CEO considering the role of video in your app, a product manager or team lead overseeing video content, or a developer on the ground building user experiences. It will give you a solid framework for what you need to know before incorporating video into your websites and apps or taking your existing infrastructure to the next level so that you can deliver seamless, high-quality video experiences that drive real results.

The rest of this chapter looks at the changing role of video and the special role developers play in deploying it. Chapter 2 examines how video is built and details some of the unique challenges involved. Chapter 3 walks you through what you need to consider when deciding whether to design and build video infrastructure yourself or whether to partner with a third-party expert. Chapter 4 concludes the report with four anonymized case studies of companies that built video into their businesses’ software architecture to show how they approached this task and why they were successful.

This report makes the case that you’re probably better off outsourcing your video development needs to experts, freeing your in-house developers to do what they do best. Yes, it’s possible to build your own streaming infrastructure—especially if you have unlimited time and money and a team of video wizards on staff. But most companies want to save time and money. Building video platforms and the streaming infrastructure that supports them is a specialized skill set. Even for the best developers and engineers, it isn’t easy to learn on the fly. We’ll show you what we mean in the pages ahead.

Why Do Businesses Employ Video?

The prevalence of phone cameras and user-generated content gives viewers the chance to become creators as well, and chat, likes, and other interactive features make today’s video a far more interactive experience than the passive, one-way film and video of the past. Interactive video engages people on an emotional level in new and powerful ways.

Businesses employ video for a variety of purposes, including:

• Driving traffic to a product or service

• Increasing brand awareness

• Improving customer satisfaction

• Building social proof

• Increasing community engagement

Later in this report we’ll provide some detailed case studies of how and why businesses are not just using video, but considering their entire video infrastructure to reach their goals. For now, let’s look at an array of brief examples from different industries to give you a sense of the possibilities.

One company with a stock-trading app uses video to add value, boost traffic, and increase trading frequency. Stock traders, the company’s key users, were checking the older version of the app heavily first thing in the morning and at the close of business in the evening, but traffic was otherwise light—which was far from ideal. The company’s goal was to increase engagement and trading throughout the day by offering a daily video stream of high-quality financial news sourced from well-respected outlets. The company began working with a third-party video specialist to develop a video infrastructure robust enough to support that goal. Activity and engagement on the app increased significantly.

What made the difference wasn’t just that the company offered this valuable video stream, though, or even that it worked well, without the latency (delays) or quality issues that turn off customers. It was that the developers, who were not video experts, were able to integrate their new video offering into their app seamlessly and swiftly, without the headaches and delays of building it from scratch. This enabled them to focus on providing great content, instead of on troubleshooting.

Another company offers its independent artist-users income via a paying membership base of subscribers—a way to monetize their creations into a far more reliable income stream than what posting on YouTube or traditional social platforms can provide. The artists work in a variety of forms, including film, music, podcasting, and more. Each artist has a platform where they offer content and “perks” of their choice for fans, with premium perks for those who choose a higher funding tier.

On their platform pages, artists were posting their writing and photography to highlight their work and interact directly with their fans. They soon began requesting the ability to post video too. The company was eager to accommodate them—but hosting user-generated content (UGC) can get complicated quickly. Existing solutions such as YouTube and Vimeo came with drawbacks, such as a lack of control over the user experience or unexpectedly high pricing as bandwidth usage increased. Publishing outside the platform was a disjointed experience for creators. This company ultimately chose to work with a third-party video infrastructure platform to deliver a branded user experience and transparent pricing that worked with its scale, allowing artists to build their subscriber bases and further their careers.

In another example of UGC, an online community for photographers and videographers wanted to give users a place to create art directly. It decided to offer a multimedia creation tool that enables subscribers to edit and manipulate colors, shapes, and layers in their photos and videos. It planned to allow visitors to try the tool but to require that they subscribe in order to save and post their work, share tips and tricks, and seek feedback. The company knew its community would react enthusiastically to the experiment—if the tool was fast, nimble, and reactive enough to stand up to a surge in traffic. The experiment was a success, and the company is thinking big about its next move in video.

The Developer’s Central Role in Video

Who makes the decisions about how any given company uses video to solve a particular need? Many people probably think marketing and product owners do, but one important group is often overlooked: software and web developers. Developers don’t necessarily decide whether their companies will employ video, but they play a critical role in deciding how to do so. They make important decisions about how to build the applications and help the rest of the organization understand what is possible. Developers are also responsible for integrating disparate technologies and making sure they work. They need to execute quickly, on time and on budget, and they need to future-proof their products (more on that later).

You might think of developers as creative realists: they know what is achievable, what simply isn’t feasible, and how the available technology can release the creative potential of the content. Their top priority is for users to have a good experience, and that extends to how viewers watch video on their site or app: developers need to deliver a high-quality video segment as quickly as possible, that works the way audiences expect it to, and avoid disruptive experiences like buffering (which happens when the video needs to pause to load more content) that cause people to leave.

Summary

The truth, as every developer knows, is that when you account for viewers’ network conditions, devices, locations, and more, it’s difficult to build even a how-to video successfully, let alone a platform filled with video content. Even highly experienced developers may lack the expertise needed for the nuanced needs of video. Managing video effectively requires a thorough understanding of how several completely different subcomponents of technology work together under the hood, from codecs and containers to bit rates and browsers. We’ll look at how it all fits together in Chapter 2.

With all of this to consider, it’s no wonder that many companies see building video for the internet as a daunting task. In the next chapter, we’ll look at the options for building video: the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, common pitfalls, and why working with an established third-party video infrastructure solution can help with so many companies’ video needs.

¹ Cisco, reproduced in “Why video is awesome” by Jon Dahl, https://www.mux.com/blog/why-video-is-awesome.