Developer Guide

Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin Developer Guide

Introduction

Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin is the enterprise-class VideolyticsTM solution. It provides rich insights into your video traffic, user engagement, and marketing effectiveness.

Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin provides video-centric metrics such as:

  • Playtime and play count,
  • Playthrough statistics (e.g., what percentage of the video has been played),
  • Hotspot analysis (e.g., which part of your video is watched the most),
  • User engagement (e.g., play, pause, rewind, seek, and replay actions),
  • Viral distribution statistics (e.g., sharing and embedding statistics),
  • In-video ad impressions and ad revenue (Requires Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin Ads plug-in)

The interactive reporting allows you to:

  • Overlay user engagement statistics on the video as the video plays
  • Overlay traffic on a map and analyze the geographic distribution of your audience
  • Analyze data by content, audience, geography and time
  • Create video groups and view analaytics by group

Security settings for trackers:

To improve security and integrity of the analytics data, Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin not only uses player security standards, but also filters the data by the video player. This way, it will be much harder for people to hack or pollute your analytics data. However, you need to enable this security feature. To do so:

  • Login to Kantar VideolyticsTM
  • Add the URL of your player to authenticate/ verify it

After you add the player, your player should show up in the authenticated players list. The server will only use the analytics data that is generated by authenticated player(s) and other cannot pollute your analytics data.

Why is this more secure? If you do not verify your player, the analytics server would accept the analytics data that is generated by any player that has your tracker key. Malicious people may write players and embed your tracker key to pollute your analytics data. By authenticating your player, you protect yourself against such attacks.

API

Player Events are mapped to statistics computed in servers and displayed on web interface. Kantar VideolyticsTM plug-in can listen to many different types of events, but the following 3 types matter the most:

  • Video events
  • User engagement events and
  • Ad events.

The plug-in listens to all the standard video events by default, so you most likely do not need to worry about that. However, certain user engagement and ads events are non-standard events; you need to dispatch them to the analytics plugin to track them.

Complete list of events and examples are in API section.

Platform Specifics

Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin for Adobe Flash© Video Players (v1.5)

I. Kantar VideolyticsTM plug-in architecture

The Kantar VideolyticsTM Plug-in is a small module;
It tracks video player, user engagement, and ad impression statistics as well as custom events. Any video player based on Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight can load this module dynamically. Once activated, it collects statistics and delivers them to the Kantar VideolyticsTM server farm so that you can view the analytics data online at http://track.kantarvideo.com.
Since the plug-in sends data silently to your Kantar VideolyticsTM account, you will not notice anything different about your player after it is
installed.
More detailed information on how plugins works can be found at works plugin API pages.

II. Installation and integration with your player

Integrating the Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin to your players should take just a few minutes:

  • If you are using one of supported players, such as JW Player or Flow Player, you have ready-made plug-ins. Just change a couple of variables and you are ready to go.
  • If you have a custom player based on common open source players or Adobe’s video player classes, follow our directions to insert a couple of lines of code inside your player and recompile.

If you use one of the popular open source video players or a player which was derived from one of the open source video players such as JW Player or Flow Player, you can use the appropriate plug-in provided by Kantar. Integrating analytics plug-in for these players is super easy, just add couple of parameters into “flashvars” in your HTML code.

If you use a custom video player that uses standard Adobe classes to display video, such as, NetStream, Video Display, Video Classes, FLVPlayback, you need to integrate analytics with your player using Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin ActionScript API. This is easier than it sounds: All you need to do is add a small piece of code to your player, download and initialize the plug-in.

If you need help integrating Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin with your player, please contact us.

Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin for HTML5 Video Player

Kantar VideolyticsTM plugin provides a wrapper for the standard HTML5 player.
Please refer to Installation instructions for HTML5 for details.

Kantar VideolyticsTM Plugin for Silverlight


Please refer to Installation instructions for Silverlight Player for details.