New Ooyala IQ Casts Wide Tech Net For Analytics, Heads For NAB Show

Ooyala today is officially unveiling its new Ooyala IQ, which it says provides the most wide-ranging audience engagement analytics, by device, operating system, traffic source or location, all in a split second. It will be showcasing the new platform at the NAB show in Las Vegas next week.  

Ooyala’s Dan Simon, director engineering, says Ooyala IQ is “an enabling platform that allows us to do a ton of things that weren’t possible before.”

It uses the relatively new open sourced Apache Spark engine for large-scale, high-stream  data processing. Simon says that allows for “very efficient parallel profiling,” so that an advertiser can, for example, match one message against another or on different devices, and see consumer reaction in moments rather than days that kind of analysis once took.

“We used to be able to say to an advertiser, ‘Here are five questions you can ask,’ “ Simon said. Now we can say, ‘Here are 20 questions you can ask.’ “ Ooyala says more “data types” will be added on as the year goes on to further extend Ooyala IQ’s capability. But being able to instantaeously analyze content based on the type of device--mobile, tablet, laptop and so on--and operating system and time, location --and measuring it for several other variables, is ground-breaking, Simon says. “It’s very, very new technology.”

On a practical basis, Simon explained, if Ooyala IQ analytics was showing that pre-roll before an piece of content was holding viewers there, a publisher could test to see if a second ad could keep the user engaged.   

Ooyala IQ, according company information, provides one-click access to detailed ‘success metrics’ – for example the the impact of ads on engagement – for each individual asset.”

That in in theory would allow a publisher to know how every episode of a series commands viewers’ attention and would affect the syndication price and pricing of commercials. Or, Ooyala says, “an asset that seems to have low overall engagement across a customer’s total footprint may turn out to be highly popular on mobile phones in a particular country or DMA. This level of contextual detail allows ad operation teams to properly value assets on a per-device, per-regional basis.”

The so-hyped “360 degree view of video performance and audience behavior,” accomplished all in milliseconds, gives advertisers and publishers data that can quickly be monetized. Ooyala IQ has been in beta testing for a year, with clients including Sky Sports, Media Prima, Fairfax Media, Telegraph Media Group, Telstra, Vox Media, Complex Media, Dell and Southern Cross Austereo, the company says.  

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