Sky avoided seasonal churn with a 2-week integration

SVOD and OTT services experience the risk of churn due to seasonality while broadcasting new seasons of popular shows. How can accurate and relevant recommendations help them in delivering the right content at the right time in order to avoid churn in such a context? How can they keep their users engaged with personalized recommendations?

Recently, Spideo and Sky Switzerland answered these questions by starting a collaboration.

ClientSky Switzerland

Sky Switzerland is part of the Sky Limited media and telecommunications conglomerate owned by Comcast. Sky is Europe’s largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster by revenue with 23 million subscribers. Sky launched Sky Sport as an OTT service in Switzerland, followed by an OTT entertainment service known as Sky Show in 2018.

The Objectives

Managing people’s tastes when they are in front of their devices is a challenging job. Viewers want to quickly find what interests them, what is relevant to them, and enjoy the content they watch. All of these variables can be different at any given time. After all, you might prefer watching a family movie if your kids are in the room. If they aren’t, you might want to see a show based on wars between families set in a distant yet fictional time.

Sky Switzerland as a SVOD, OTT, multi-device platform, faces that constant challenge – how to serve its subscribers with the best content at any time.

Spideo is a SaaS company that provides humanized recommendations and helps customers such as Sky to have the toolbox which allows people not to feel disappointed when they see “Recommended for you”.

The Challenge

With the increasing growth of their subscriber base and while enjoying the popularity of one of the most successful shows ever, Game of Thrones, Sky Switzerland wants its subscribers to appreciate the entertainment experience in a continuous way. The end of such a popular show on their platform represented a risk of churn, hence it needed to be addressed correctly. Within two weeks of integration, Spideo gave Sky Switzerland the ability to implement recommendations. Speed and agility were key factors in this project as we needed to quickly find a way to keep GOT’s audience engaged on Sky’s platform after the last episode of season 8.

The Resolution

Sky Switzerland wanted to compare the solutions available on the market to see which one would perform best in this kind of situations. The goal here was to take recommendation as an opportunity to keep Game of Thrones (GOT) fans engaged on their platform.

The first step was to integrate Spideo’s recommendations for related content. Content-to-Content recommendations were made directly available on the TV Show page. At the bottom of the GOT page, recommendations were displayed to users as multifaceted suggestions sorted out by semantic categories. For example, thematically organized recommendations included content playlists like:

-“Stories about Royalty”,

-“Legendary Creatures”,

-or “Suspense & Heroic Fantasy”.

The second step was to improve the user experience with profile-based recommendations. Spideo provided automated and personalized recommendations to make sure that the “Recommended for you” rail displayed on top of the home page was relevant for each individual subscriber. This required careful integration so that all past interactions could be taken into account while delivering results within short response time (below 300ms).

Key benefits

Sky Switzerland wanted to improve both satisfaction and engagement. After implementing the Spideo solution, they reached 12% of Click-Through Rate (CTR) and 44% of Conversion-to-Play Rate on recommended content for Game of Thrones watchers! Meaning that almost one in every two subscribers who clicked on the recommendation rails ended-up watching content proposed to them by Spideo.

Adopting Spideo has also greatly improved loyalty, with a significant increase of their Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Sky Switzerland benefited from Spideo’s expertise on content, data and semantics.

What was the most recommended content for GOT watchers? Chernobyl!

“

At Spideo, we are delighted to have had the opportunity to help SKY CH in avoiding churn after one of the most successful series in history. It was a challenge to quickly set up, integrate and deliver great user experience, and we are glad to see high engagement numbers. On the other hand, our team is made of content experts who love to work with great catalogs such as the one SKY CH has. To have Spideo at the service of their subscribers is a natural fit. We are looking forward to further developing our partnership in the future.

Gabriel Mandelbaum

Co-founder & CEO