It has become a challenge when trying to write anything about anything and not to look at it from the viewpoint of COVID19. Add to that a nice touch of earthquake we had a couple of days ago and you definitely get into a „new normal“ state of mind. In this state of mind writing about your business, about your OTT product/service, about the market you're in seems almost a bit out of place. On the other hand, let's be honest, there is only so much you can do with proudly letting the world know that you work from home now and that you are using some form of communication tool like Webex (which coincidentally we do know a lot about so feel free to contact us at info@cs.hr ). Other thing you can write about is the effect this whole situation is going to have on the economy or specific branch of business. From what can be seen if you go with something along the lines of „This is going to be a crisis even worse than 10 years ago but we still have to see what is going to happen“ you would pretty much cover most of the conclusions of the articles. It is quite sure we will write about the topic some more as well but today we will just have a look at some OTT numbers from Europe.

A couple of weeks ago we have shared some information from Conviva regarding the usage of the OTT services globally, so we just figured we could have a look at what has been going on in Europe.

According to Conviva's Q4 2019 report, overall time spent streaming has increased, up 58% in 2019. globally with the biggest increase in Europe (up 65%).

Biggest share in the devices used for consuming content is as expected mobile devices (34%) followed by 24% share for connected TV, and 20% share for PCs.

Average minutes viewed per play were 20.3 minutes per play and average video start time was 3.83 seconds.

AVOD (Advertising VOD) is said to have considerable potential for the growth within the market. However, streaming providers are still experiencing challenges in bringing the proper ad delivery. Percentage of streaming ads that failed to play as expected was still rather high, measuring at 36.5% while ad start failures were at 30% Both numbers were an actual improvement from the year before. Surprisingly there were increases in average ad start time to 2.27 seconds. Data showed that 5 second delay in pre-roll ads causes 13.6% of viewers to leave the ad and the content that was to follow. Slowdown in ad starting times most likely caused 50% increase in exits before ad starts, and ad exits means lost monetization. Finally, with continuous pressure for shorter ads the overall actual ad duration decreased from 38 sec to 26.6 sec in Q4 2019.

These are all interesting numbers, and we are looking forward to the stats from this and the following quarters. Due to the specific situation with more and more people staying in home the spikes in growth of streaming services usage are expected for sure. Will it last? For how long? How will the halt in production of new content influence the services mid and long term? What about the services that focus primarily on sports with so many events being cancelled? There are plenty of questions to be answered. If you have questions regarding OTT, and how to start your service we can help you get started right away. Just get in touch (info@aviion.hr). #aviion #ott #SaaS #CScomputersystems #stayathome