Meet the Tech Company Who Sees Everything You Stream

Conviva has a big problem with all these new metrics firms. Plus Tastemade on finally building the new cable TV

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I had an interesting conversation recently with Aditya Ganjam, Chief Product Officer at Conviva.

I’m guessing you don’t know Conviva. According to Ganjam, they’re an analytics company built specifically for streaming. Conviva works with most of the major legacy media companies - Disney, Warner Discovery - but importantly, not the tech players like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube.

“We measure in real time the user experience in video and the full application,” said Ganjam. It’s not just you - the UI and ad delivery experience in many streaming apps leaves a lot to be desired, Ganjam said - and the problem keeps getting more challenging because consumption is growing so fast.

Conviva started out for people on the product side. But because its software development kit is plugged into so many major video players and apps, they firm collects a ton of intel on the broader video marketplace, which naturally started to catch the eyes of non-product executives at big media companies. “Because we were measuring engagement and experience, the data became very interesting to the business side,” he said.

Today, Conviva has products built specifically for the sales side- such as a tool that helps media companies connect viewership across apps and devices of a single show across a household.

As many of Conviva’s media partners over the past few years have embraced new measurement partners in the interest of employing new, more accurate currencies, Ganjam sees a big problem. All the new metrics may be totally flawed - thanks to Burnt Toast.

Burnt Toast is Ganjam’s analogy for what he sees as a fundamental flaw in the data produced by all the new TV currency companies. Many of these alternative currency firms mix together set -top data and ACR data, for example. But in Ganjam’s view, the data that these firms blend together has already been processed - in some cases considerably altered. So the numbers that are subsequently calculated from these data mixes are likely to be way off to begin with - since you can’t unprocess data. "You can’t unburn toast,” he said.

Plus, per Ganjam, many different data vendors employ different definitions of metrics, even for such basics s what constitutes a video ‘play’ (a few frames, a few seconds, a few minutes?) - further compromising the data.

“Everyone can have a different definition,” he said. “It’s an impossible problem.”

A problem to which Conviva naturally thinks it has a solution for. No, the company doesn’t want to compete with comScore or Nielsen, but rather aspires to provide the back end set of tools to compute streaming metrics in a standardized way.

“New currencies are very inaccurate,” he said. “That’s why nobody trusts these currencies. We don’t want to be a currency company. We are a tech company that enables this. This is a tech problem. Those companies are not technology companies.”

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On a completely different note, I had an excellent podcast conversation this week with Tastemade’s co-founder and CEO Larry Fitzgibbon on the company’s early' vision to replicate the cable TV model on web video, only to find itself as a major FAST player more than a decade later.

“The majority of Tastemade's viewership now happens on TV,” he told me.

“The joke we like to say is - I think the last cable network that launched was Oprah's network. And I think that cost Discovery like $600 million, or at least $400 million. And we used to joke that we launched our network for like $400,000.”

Not that TV economics aren’t appealing.

“The monetization on streaming is far superior than what you find on social,” he said.

I think you’ll enjoy this one.