Streaming service, BluTV, understands viewing habits to inform content decisions

BluTV is Turkey's #1 subscription based video-on-demand service. Founded in Istanbul in 2016, it offers a wide range of award winning international and Turkish content and original programming to its audience. The company uses Tableau to provide key data insights into business-critical areas including viewer habits, customer conversion rates (from free trial to paid subscription) and popular content on the platform. This information allows BluTV to deliver an optimized viewing experience for every customer and make informed decisions on future content commissioning.

As a heavily data-driven business, BluTV's leadership team knew very early that spreadsheet-based analysis simply wouldn't be good enough for their needs.

"We use data in nearly every aspect of our business operations," says Ezgi Cetiner, a key user of business intelligence at BluTV. "Fast, accurate analysis is critical in helping us understand our viewers and their behavior. It's what our business is built on, so we need tools that allow us to do that."

Before Tableau, the company relied on Google Analytics and Excel-based reports to identify and understand key business trends. However, the cumbersome, manual nature of the process restricted reporting to just once per week, or once per month in some instances, which didn't allow for meaningful insight in such a fast-paced industry.

"A significant amount of our team's time was going on creating various operational reports which were not only time consuming to produce but difficult to interpret accurately," says Uygar Köse, data engineer at BluTV. "As a result, data was often outdated by the time the team saw it and the chance of learning anything from it was lost."

With Tableau in place, BluTV has fast, actionable insights into all key business areas including popular content, CRM, marketing campaigns and financials.

"With Tableau, we can connect information from various sources including HIVE/HADOOP, Google Analytics, and Amazon Redshift in one central location, allowing for much more comprehensive analysis than ever before," says Hüseyin Yurtseven, Chief Technology Officer of BluTV. "The data is available at all times, meaning reports and analysis can be pulled whenever required, without the need to manually compile it in spreadsheets."

As a result of moving to Tableau, a number of problematic data siloes have also been broken down within the company.

"All key data is now available as interactive visualizations in Tableau, so there's never any need to go chasing for locally stored data anymore," explains Ezgi Cetiner. "Its ease of use also means people without any IT experience can start gaining valuable insights from the data immediately."

BluTV offers all viewers a free seven-day trial of its service before asking them to convert to a paid subscriber. Securing these conversions is a key aspect of the company's business model, which makes understanding customer behavior particularly important in this area.

"Tableau gives us fantastic insight into the factors driving conversions to our paid service," explains Ezgi. "Using data captured through Google Analytics and our own databases and visualized in Tableau, we can quickly pinpoint how and when people are choosing to become paid subscribers and identify what content they've been watching prior to their decision."

Using this information, BluTV can shape effective marketing campaigns, offer timely incentives, and deliver new content at optimum moments during the week or year to boost subscriptions.

"The ability to monitor subscription data in Tableau gives us a near real-time window into our customers' mind-set and behavior," says Alptug Copuroglu, CFO and Head of Business Development at BluTV. "This means we can react quickly to changes in customer behavior and adapt content and marketing efforts accordingly."

Conversely, Tableau has also given BluTV greater insight into subscription cancellations and the reasons behind them. "When people choose to leave our service, it's extremely valuable to understand their reasons behind it," says Onur Polat, Customer Value Manager at BluTV. "Whether it's lack of support for a particular device, cancellation of a favorite show, price changes or something else entirely, Tableau lets us visualize all of this data in one place and quickly identify major drivers behind customer churn."

An area of significant interest to BluTV is watching behavior of its customers. Tableau enabled BluTV to combine watching data with subscriber data and to pinpoint the shows that are really hooking people in.

This data-driven approach to content analysis means BluTV can quickly identify fan favorites and the shows delivering the biggest return on investment. These insights can then be used to guide the future direction of content productions and acquisitions and inform decisions regarding the re-commissioning of shows for additional seasons.

The company also uses Tableau data insights when scheduling content on its service. "Tableau allowed us to drill deep into viewing habits, revealing a number of interesting patterns," says Ezgi Cetiner. "While the majority of viewers watch a fairly wide variety of content during the week, many of them focus on original content at the weekends, when they have more time to 'binge watch' multiple episodes at a time."

As a result, BluTV ensures the majority of its most popular shows premiere just before the weekend, when viewers are most receptive to it.

"Viewing habits have change continuously," concludes Alptug Copuroglu. "People want much more control over where and when they watch their favorite shows. Using data to create a content plan that closely matches the habits of our viewers increases customer satisfaction and customer lifetime on our platform."