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ITV selects WebAbacus to track streaming media success

Tuesday 12th February 2008

Foviance, the expert in online user experience, has been selected by commercial TV broadcaster ITV to accurately measure the online usage of its growing portfolio of streaming media services.

ITV finalised its £20 million online revamp in August 2007, and a key offering was delivery of simulcasts for ITV1, ITV2 and ITV3, to allow audiences to watch programmes online in near real-time. Programmes across a full range of genres were also made available for free viewing on-demand for up to 30 days.

Foviance's cutting-edge web analytics platform WebAbacus will help ITV to analyse how successful its expanded services are, and to have more detail on the ways streaming media is being used.

The WebAbacus solution was implemented in four days, and usage reports are already being generated. Initial data has shown that since the ITV website re-launch, video consumption doubled month-on-month to a peak of 2.2 million video views a month in November, which was led by ITV's successful 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here'. Video views for January also averaged around the two million mark.

Short clips are emerging as the most popular type of videos viewed, but long-form (i.e. full episodes) are contributing to at least of 40 per cent of all videos viewed each month.

Reports have shown that the most popular streams are 'Coronation Street' catch-ups and pre-views, yet the most popular clip of all time is 'Secret Diary of a Call Girl'. Other popular streams are ITV's drama’s such as 'Primeval' and 'Echo Beach'.

Sean Burton, product manager for WebAbacus, comments: "We were confident that we could deliver a solution quickly that met ITV's requirements. WebAbacus is an analytical platform, and is not simply a set of 'canned' reports. It empowers end users to create new reports 'on-the-fly' using the purely web-based interface. The reports can then reference WebAbacus' proprietary data store and produce reports in real-time without the need to re-process data."

Shorful Islam, head of business information, ITV broadband, adds: "We can generate as much information as we want, when we want. We can see how many times a video has been played and from what area of the site it has been accessed. This gives us good information on the relative popularity of genres within the site. It's been a great success and ITV executives are really happy about the information they are now getting. It clearly works!"