Case study

TMG improves startup time by over 35% with Mux Data

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Telegraaf Media Groep N.V. (TMG) is one of the largest media companies in the Netherlands. With various distribution channels, including newspaper and digital platforms, they bring news, sports, and entertainment to over 7 million consumers daily. Their media brands and content attract advertising partners looking for both reach and relevance.

Maintaining a high quality of experience is critical for TMG since it impacts both their viewers and advertisers. By offering a consistent, reliable, high-quality experience, viewers are more likely to stay engaged with content and,in turn, advertisers are happy because they can serve more ads.

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It was imperative that TMG’s video operations team has the ability to measure performance and track any other systems that could impact experience, like CDNs or ad servers. However, the video operations team was relying on Google Analytics or at times trying to get backend data from a CDN partner to try and pull performance data but “it would always be too late with too little information,” said Patrick Knopjes, Operations Manager Video.

This led Patrick to search for a solution that provided service performance metrics and alerts with the ability to immediately identify the root cause of an issue.

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Patrick and his team found a solution with Mux Data. “The dashboard and analytics are incredibly intuitive. I didn’t have to set up all sorts of thresholds for alerts because Mux had already done it for me. In addition, the filtering options made it easy to do a deep dive for particular insights such as browser, device, or geography.”

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After using Mux Data for just one week, the TMG video operations team found that their Startup Score was the lowest of all the experience scores which include playback success, startup time, smoothness, and quality. This indicated startup time was slow and helped the team prioritize this as something to investigate further and fix. The team dug deeper using Mux’s 2-dimensional filtering and found that on Android, views with pre-roll ads were experiencing an issue.

The team then compared startup time on two different properties they control that used two different ad providers. They then conducted a quick A/B test and confirmed that one ad provider was, in fact, generating longer startup times running on Android devices. The team was able to swiftly make the appropriate adjustments and improve startup times by over 35%.

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Having data is one thing, but what Mux enables Patrick’s team to do is act on that data. Going forward, the team will continue to measure their performance, discover areas of improvement, prioritize where to focus, and conduct experiments to further optimize their platform. With this framework, TMG can reach their goal of bringing the best experience to their viewers and do it in a way that fulfills their promise of keeping their customers “at the heart of everything we do.”