Understand metric definitions
Understand the playback metrics Mux uses to measure viewership and quality of experience.
Engagement and Quality of Experience metrics are tracked during each playback attempt and a value for each metric is assigned to the view that is generated. Metrics reports aggregate the values from individual, completed views that match a specified filter to calculate the metric for analysis.
Each report is defined by the metric being analyzed, the time range, and a filter that can focus the report on a specific subset of views. Engagement metrics use the start time of each view for determining if it should be included in a time range. Quality of Experience metrics are aggregated based on the end time of each view. Views are only included in a metric calculation if they have a valid value for the metric.
Views and Watch Time
Views and Watch Time are key metrics that are often shown along with other engagement or Quality of Experience metrics in your Mux dashboard.
Definition of a View
In Mux Data, a "View" is an attempt (successful or not) to play a video. A view is created when a viewer clicks play or if playback is started programmatically.
Each view is tracked until the playback is ended (for example, by the viewer navigating off the page with the video being played) or for up to an hour after playback stops without being ended. If the user taps play, the video starts to load and fails, that counts as a single view. If a user taps play, starts watching the video, pauses, then resumes that counts as a single view.
A single video can be watched multiple times in a single view by looping or seeking to the start of the video. If you are seeing more views than expected in your dashboard or what appear to be duplicate views check on the code that initializes the Mux Data SDK to make sure you are initializing it once per playback attempt.
How Watch Time is calculated
Watch Time is not currently an aggregated metric in Mux Data but is used in some of the metrics calculations. The Watch Time for a view is the cumulative amount of time the user spent watching or attempting to watch the video. This metric includes actively playing content, starting up, rebuffering, and seeking. It is similar to Playing Time, which is an aggregated metric available for analysis, but Watch Time also includes the time spent rebuffering.
If user watches for 90 seconds, has 4 seconds of rebuffering, spends 2 seconds seeking by rewinding and then watches 60 more seconds that would total 156 seconds of watch time (90 + 4 + 2 + 60).
Metrics
Mux has engagement metrics to track viewership and five top-level metrics to measure quality of experience. Detailed definitions and formulas can be found on these metric guide pages:
These metrics are available in the Mux Data Dashboard and via the Mux Data API. They can be used by your team to track KPIs and optimize the viewing experience for your end users.
This is what the metrics look like on the Mux Data Dashboard:
In order to get the most value out of the metrics measured by Mux, make sure your data is actionable by providing valuable metadata for each view. Use this in conjunction with filters to segment data metrics.