Endeavor Streaming unlocks new data opportunities in D2C streaming with AWS

This blog was co-authored by Ivy Lam and David Dwyer, Endeavor Streaming, and Kevin Yao and Simon Christie, AWS.

As momentum for direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming continues to build, more streaming providers are prioritizing audience personalization and retention. Though D2C streams provide a distinct advantage over traditional linear broadcasts when it comes to capturing first-party data, effectively accessing, visualizing, and acting on that data has historically proven challenging. Leveraging a host of technologies from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Endeavor Streaming Platform is filling this gap. The platform unlocks real-time, data-driven insights that can be used to rapidly evolve D2C streaming service offerings and inform marketing campaigns to maximize user acquisition, conversion, and retention, leading to higher profits, increased loyalty, and an improved user experience.

Developed by Endeavor Streaming, a subsidiary of global sports and media company Endeavor and a leader in premium video distribution and monetization for live and on-demand content , the platform is continually evolving to keep pace with the latest streaming viewership trends and technologies, including analytics. One of the latest platform updates in development, a new self-service analytics tool, lets users build custom audiences, create and track cohorts and analyze and aggregate data across every dimension to drill into the underlying data for business and marketing needs. Featuring responsive charts and clear data visualizations, the analytics tool enables users to slice and dice data to uncover insights like viewing device and country breakdown, performance by content type, subscriber engagement over time, and more. These insights can then be used to track the effectiveness and profitability of marketing campaigns.

How it works

Viewer interactions with the Endeavor Streaming platform are captured, fired off as events, and sent to Amazon Kinesis, the platform’s real-time activity source. The recently released Amazon Redshift Streaming Ingestion service then allows Endeavor Streaming to collect and push consumer activity over Kinesis directly into a materialized view on the Amazon Redshift data warehouse with low latency and high ingestion rates. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is also used for data storage as the data lake for incoming data used to enrich viewer data with additional actionable insights.

Once data is uploaded to Amazon Redshift, the service’s massive parallel processing capabilities transform and enrich the data with business domain insights. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances query the data warehouse for quick access to the data that can be interactively visualized and acted on. AWS’s synergetic cloud services enable the platform to deliver ancillary functionality of the self-service analytics tool, including serverless services for reporting and orchestration of recurring actions on insights using AWS Step Functions and Lambdas.

Endeavor Streaming’s Vice President of Data Services David Dwyer shares, “Using Amazon technology has enabled us to capture real-time user behavior and stream it directly into our self-service analytics data warehouse powered by Amazon Redshift so our streaming partners can make more immediate and data-informed business decisions.”

The consumer connection advantage

Using the technology, businesses and marketers can more confidently invest in subscriber promotions and sign-up campaigns, or update service elements such as UX experience, product, and pricing. Viewing experience and engagement data is continuously collected and fed into the Endeavor Streaming platform, providing fast, intelligent insights that can inform future strategies and monetization tactics. The platform’s self-service analytics capabilities, which harness scalable and highly available AWS services, empower users to easily uncover the critical insights and trends that happen in reaction to their service offerings, promotions, campaigns, or platform/UI changes. Ultimately, this allows them to better measure the success of these activities and track their impacts on business growth.

For more information about Endeavor Streaming – a trusted partner for leading global brands delivering major tentpole events like WrestleMania and UFC fight cards, and powering streaming services such as WWE Network, W/NBA League Pass, UFC FIGHT PASS, and NYFW – visit: https://www.endeavorstreaming.com.

AWS offers the most purpose-built services for direct-to-consumer (D2C) and streaming to help companies reliably deliver, monetize, and support live and on-demand media over the internet and bring unparalleled experiences to screens everywhere. Explore https://thinkwithwp.com/media/direct-to-consumer-d2c-streaming/