In a modern-day version of the Pavlov’s Dogs experiment and reflex, you need only mention the phrase “video analytics” to get marketers and advertisers salivating profusely.

Why? Because although many video service providers have been in the rich content distribution business for many years, often delivering the same fare in roughly the same way to the same customers, they find they don’t really know enough about their viewers to begin a climb up the revenue ladder to higher average revenue per user (ARPU).

Concurrently, content owners are sitting on vast warehouses of precious video assets. The opportunity to market and monetize this precious programming – with distribution channels that know the interest and wants of their consumer - is overwhelmingly magnetic.

Pitching content to the masses is fine, but personalized pitches aka recommendations, are far more effective from a marketing perspective, if you know your customer well.

Analyze First, Market Next

Digitalsmiths, a TiVo company, has pioneered these efforts and this week used the phrase “video analytics” in the launch of a multifaceted product. Its Seamless Insight offering is a platform that provides video service providers sorely needed reporting and analytics to fuel customer engagement, ARPU and satisfaction.

The Durham, N.C.-based video search and recommendation innovator says Seamless Insight presents video service providers actionable visibility to optimize targeted content promotions that increase ARPU and improve viewer engagement.

The new platform is designed to address the challenges encountered as personalized content discovery features expand and video service providers find themselves faced with massive increases in the volume and variety of data available regarding viewer interactions. So, operators have plenty of data on their customers, but aren’t utilizing it to drive additional revenue opportunities.

Know Your Target - Well

Seamless Insight enables operators to analyze and operationalize that massive volume of personalized viewer data to quickly drive increased revenue per user. This targeting boosts the performance of cross-platform content promotions – and boosts revenue accordingly.

 “We’ve spent years improving the personalized content discovery experience and we’ve demonstrated time and time again that video providers are not leveraging their data to optimize and further innovate the TV experience," said Chris Ambrozic, Senior Director of Product at Digitalsmiths in prepared comments. “In order to address these ongoing lost opportunities, we built an analytics platform that advances the content discovery process and provides our customers with a tool to increase revenue by promoting content that is vastly more appealing to their subscribers, ultimately leading to greater trust with their subscribers.”

The vendor’s Seamless Insight platform consists of multiple modules at launch:

The Discovery Dashboards

The dashboards provide executives, the ARPU team, engineers and product teams a snapshot of the usage and stability of their cross-platform content discovery offerings, claims the vendor. “Stakeholders can identify the products, devices and content driving the greatest ROI, understand consumption and engagement patterns by device type, for any timeframe, and identify any downtime or data quality issues.”

The ARPU Module

Digitalsmiths says the ARPU Module helps the merchandising team achieve its primary goal of increasing revenue per viewer through multiple mediums and thousands of assets.

The problem today, the vendor contends, is team members do not have visibility into what promotions work best and why. This module provides technology to “build and deliver deep multivariate A/B tests to subsets of viewers, and provide a clear picture on campaign performance to optimize future promotions.”

The module is designed to enable video service providers create and test various promotions for channels, packages, premium content and Pay-Per-View across all applications and devices, according to Digitalsmiths.

The company has completed prototype testing with multiple video services providers and said it plans to demonstrate the platform and its powers at the Consumer Electronics Show next month.

Let the salivating begin.