Watching That’s Real-Time Data Monitoring Story
Watching That has been named a Finalist in the 2023 Cynopsis Measure Up Awards, in the ‘Best Tool for Real-Time Reporting’ category. We’re really excited about this award, because it comes from an organisation known for their focus on data and technology – two things we’re passionate about.
The winner will be announced in June, so while we wait with baited breath, below is an exploration of how we use real-time data to power our monitoring module.
Before we created our platform, every time we spoke to Revenue or Advertising Operations teams, we found they were reporting on their campaigns too slowly, and the data they had was clunky. The available BI tools were not designed for video, and their tech partner’s analytics were limited.
The result was that Rev Ops managers couldn’t identify when ad campaigns weren’t delivering. Ad delivery errors were rife, and troubleshooting tools didn’t exist. Software was not designed for Connected TV, and required data scientists who understood SQL.
The streaming video sector was in the midst of a revolution – new channels, new platforms, new revenue models, and new users. Platforms were adapting their consumer-facing products as fast as they could, but behind-the-scenes they were struggling to get to grips with fragmented data, poor reporting and analytics. None of which were even close to real-time.
Every second delay in responding to an anomaly meant money was being lost.
We had a vision of Operations teams spotting, diagnosing, and responding to issues immediately. Their jobs would be optimising, not fire-fighting.
And we wanted to make it a reality.
So we built Watching That’s Monitoring module. It drew data straight from the source and rendered it into visualisations for customers immediately.
In our new streaming architecture, data is continuously ingested, then reconstituted in the platform.
By treating data as a stream, rather than batch processing (like traditional BI tools), we create multidimensional ‘sessions’. Users see how separate metrics and dimensions relate.
An example? The number of play-outs of a creative can be broken out by platform.
The combination of the always-on, real time data rendering, with multidimensional sessions cannot be found in any other video monitoring platform.
Customers love that they can set monitors based on relative or absolute change in a metric and then receive an Alert notification in email or Slack when a threshold is reached. They can then pin-pint the source of a problem efficiently.
This has become a revenue protection insurance, a round-the-clock source of information.
Always-on, near real-time monitoring is just one aspect of the Watching That experience. We also offer customisable reports, comprehensive troubleshooting, with our customer support team with a background in video and data analysis.
We replace the traditional BI ‘shipping container’ approach with a ‘pipeline’ architecture. This means uninterrupted, constant, and real-time data delivery.
Connected TV never sleeps, and neither does Watching That’s always-on, near real-time monitoring solution.
If you’d like to talk about monitoring your video inventory, get in touch.
