Synamedia Clarissa gives Astro a holistic view across all its TV and video data sets to reveal viewing patterns, and measure the impact of actions to improve the subscriber experience.
Malaysian content and entertainment company, Astro Malaysia Holdings is currently focussing investment on content and the user experience. Aiming to gain a deeper understanding of how business decisions impact viewer behaviour and content consumption, their goal is increasing engagement.
Astro has adopted Synamedia Clarissa business insights software in order to take a comprehensive view across all of their TV and video data sets and discover behavioural and consumption patterns among viewers. In particular, they are using Clarissa to measure the impact of the various investments they are making to improve the subscriber experience.
For example, Astro can change an element of their service and immediately see if and how this impacts other key performance indicators (KPIs) such as return-to-platform and average watch time. Typical changes might include fine-tuning a new customer on-boarding flow, or simplifying the path to content by reducing the number of clicks. With an overview of all services, Astro’s business and operations teams can act in a data-led manner and respond to insights as they make decisions.
Visualising Data
This universal view visualises the data across Clarissa’s four applications -- viewing quality, user experience, content consumption and advertising insights. The viewing quality dashboards display quantifiable insights about how many users are affected by user error, service issues and external factors while viewing. Content consumption figures plot varying levels of engagement, the impact of promotions, and how viewers watch certain content.
Viewer experience patterns show operators how to make content discovery simpler -- finding the right content at the right time for the right people on any device. Advertising insights are used to segment viewers by behaviour to generate specific value for advertising, as well as measure advertising effectiveness.
By unifying data from many sources, insights from Clarissa on performance identify what content is popular across all video services, and on which devices and in what format. The use of machine learning to analyse content metadata also improves Clarissa’s ability to help predict which content will increase engagement. Armed with these insights, users can change the way future programs are created and distributed.
As a managed software-as-a-service, aligned to Astro’s KPIs and designed specifically for the video sector, Clarissa was in place and running at Astro in about six weeks. The staff are currently using the software to help them decide how to promote a new feature that improves content discovery, with the goal of getting viewers to content quicker, and also to understand user navigation in order to shorten viewers’ journeys to the content they want to watch.
Immersive and Addressable
During 2022, Astro launched Synamedia Iris addressable advertising services on the Astro GO on-demand service, Ultra 4K, Ulti HD set-top boxes and, in July, on linear TV. Iris unifies targeting across linear and streaming video. Astro Addressable Advertising is the first such service in South East Asia and allows advertisers to show different ads to different households while they are watching the same programme, based on data including location and demographics.
Astro and Synamedia partnered with TeraVolt on the development of Astro Go Interactive Mode, which went live in 2021, to give Astro’s many live sports fans an immersive viewing experience across all devices. Its features include live auto-highlights, instant match stats and interactive timelines, and player and team rankings displayed as an overlay synchronised with the live stream – all of which Astro says has driven up streaming minutes and fan engagement.
More recently, the Astro Go service became available on Smart TVs through a partnership between 3 Screen Solutions (3SS)and Synamedia. Astro has also adopted Synamedia’s EverGuard real-time anti-piracy managed service to protect content investments, including live sports. www.synamedia.com
