Broadcaster, Content Owner, OTT Platform Operator
Hallmark Media Family Networks is the team behind Hallmark’s wildly popular 24-hour cable networks: Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Drama, and Hallmark Movies and Mysteries.
They oversee content distribution across ten web, mobile, and OTT platforms with successful content offerings such as Home & Family, The Good Witch film franchise, and the historic Hallmark Hall of Fame their wildly successful original Christmas movies — more than 80 million people flock to their televisions to revel in the merriment of the season (which starts as early as September!).
Highlights
Real-time analytics and reporting stack available company wide
Consolidated multiple analytics and reporting solutions into a single platform
Re-invest costs associated with multiple analytics solutions to other parts of the business
Challenges
With the consolidation of teams and platforms, Hallmark Media wanted to leverage the opportunity to improve their OTT streaming stack. During this time, they realized that part and parcel to improved streaming was the need to embark on a company-wide initiative to restructure their data strategy. Even with previously-approved implementations of their analytics providers, the conflict of expectations and support imposed a constant drain on development resources and budgets that were needed for other projects.
Reduce the number of reporting and analytics solutions in use across the different media properties
Eliminate the need for constant development resources needed to optimize and configure different analytics solutions
Solution
Knowing that they’d be looking to do more with BigQuery & Google Analytics than they’d previously explored, Hallmark looked to Infotrust to help them define and deliver a video analytics solution leveraging Datazoom as a source of video data. Infotrust began with an audit of Hallmark’s current analytics implementations to better understand how they were being used and by what teams, where shortcomings existed, additional things they wanted to accomplish with their new analytics stack. The Infotrust analytics consulting team provided a detailed breakdown of all the requirements, as well as how data should flow to both BigQuery & Google Analytics to meet those requirements. Then Infotrust got to work, partnering and coordinating with Hallmark Media and Datazoom’s team to build metrics, dashboards and reports to monitor Audience, Content, Advertising and core video KPIs. This then translated into defining what events, metadata fluxdata and custom events/metadata were needed to generate the required insights. Infotrust, Datazoom and Hallmark Media met regularly to ensure that the schedule was being kept, and deliverables met expectations.
Results
Infotrust ensured that by the end of the engagement, Hallmark Media had a more powerful, reliable, real-time reporting and analytics stack. By implementing Datazoom as their Data-as-a-Service platform, they now have a developer friendly solution that helped them reduce the number of analytics solutions used, and reduced the complexity of maintaining multiple solutions. The overall engagement with Infotrust and Datazoom has allowed their team to re-invest both resources and analytics cost savings into other areas of their business.
With the consolidation of teams and platforms, Hallmark Media wanted to leverage the opportunity to improve their OTT streaming stack. During this time, they realized that part and parcel to improved streaming was the need to embark on a company-wide initiative to restructure their data strategy. Even with previously-approved implementations of their analytics providers, the conflict of expectations and support imposed a constant drain on development resources and budgets that were needed for other projects.
Reduction in number of analytics and reporting solutions
Cost-savings related to licensing and maintenance of multiple analytics and reporting services
Improved agility and flexibility to configure future analytics and reporting requiremetns
Datazoom’s DaaS platform was the only solution on the market which could consolidate data collection across multiple end devices, replacing a number of incumbent analytics and reporting integrations. While enabling this consolidation to a single data collection SDK, the DataZoom platform also provided a low-code means to configuring, optimizing, and building future data pipes. This reduced the amount of development and capital resources required to support the existing analytics and reporting stack, allowing Crown Media to divert those resources to other priority projects without undermining the collection and delivery of data to business units across the organization.
