We run multiple live 24/7 streams and I’m being asked by management for analytics of the streams.
Is there a way to get the number of minutes watched by clients? We want to know if our engagement is going up or down.
Thanks.
Andrew,
You would need to create a custom WSE module to track this info, or develop player side analytics collection.
You would need some way to identify each client.
Player side would be more accurate in that you could track exactly what is WATCHED. Doing this player side can be difficult as you would need to implement something for each player you support. (web, android, iOS, etc)
Doing it WSE side would work if you are delivering all the content from Wowza (and not using a CDN to cache and deliver content). This would not be as accurate as player side bc it would track what is DELIVERED instead of what I WATCHED. But my guess is it would be pretty close
I don’t believe there are existing Wowza modules to support this. Maybe someone form Wowza can chime in on that part,
I’ve designed and implemented these types of systems (both player=side and server side) and would be happy to consult. I’m at scott@blankcanvas.video
Scott Kellicker
As Scott said, player-side might be a good way to do this. We run a heartbeat every 60 seconds on our player and log that, with some intelligence to determine who is watching and for how long.
If you’re layering a CDN like Cloudfont or Akamai or something on top of Streaming Engine, you could also parse logs and create your own watch counter. That would be a more foolproof way to track things, though it will likely be delayed by several hours as CDN nodes report logs back to you.