Astro taps Synamedia for viewer insight

Malaysian pay TV provider Astro has tapped technology outfit Synamedia’s Clarissa technology to gain insights into the impact its decisions have on viewer behaviour and content consumption, with the goal of boosting subscriber engagement.

According to Synamedia, Clarissa’s view of its TV and video data will enable Astro to measure the impact of its content investments on the subscriber experience.

For example, Clarissa allows Astro to change an element of its service and see how this impacts other key performance indicators such as return-to-platform and average watch time.

Synamedia said that Clarissa’s SaaS-based deployment model enabled Astro to go live in six weeks and gain insights into the ways its subscribers interact with its services, including how they discover content.

Astro is currently using Clarissa to drive decisions on how to promote a new feature that is designed to improve content discovery with the goal of getting viewers to content quicker, Synamedia said, adding that the pay TV operator is also using Clarissa to understand user navigation in order to better streamline a viewer’s journeys to the content they want to watch.

Astro has previously deployed Synamedia’s Iris addressable advertising tech, which went live in July on its main linear TV platform following launches on the Astro Go on-demand service, Ultra 4K and Ulti HD set-tops. The pay TV operator has also partnered with Synamedia on a number of other initiatives.

Euan Smith, Group CEO at Astro, said, “With Clarissa we have an enhanced ability to make smarter business decisions that will help us better understand and better serve our customers. With a unified view across all our user’s journeys, our business teams can quickly understand in detail how content is being searched and consumed, finding new connections in the data, and thereby understanding where we can add more value and relevance to our services. With our continued commitment to leadership in technology and services, Clarissa is a key new tool for us.”

Paul Segre, CEO at Synamedia, said, “Unlike traditional data analytics which start with the data to try and find value, Clarissa takes an insights-first approach which is already giving Astro the ability to better understand how its subscribers behave and how they interact with their services. The onboarding and adoption of Clarissa at Astro was seamless because the service was designed at the outset for the video sector, with the metrics and insights from Clarissa already aligned to Astro’s KPIs.”