CIOInsider India Magazine
Streamingo Solutions: Engendering Priceless Market Insights Out of Visual Data
With the competitive business landscape of the digital era, organizations can’t afford to miss-out on any opportunity to optimize their already established resources. For instance, the world is overwhelmed with visual data tons of video footage and images the usage of which is largely confined to just security applications. A new forecast from IDC estimates that the global video surveillance camera market will grow to $44 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 13 percent. Bangalore-based Streamingo Solutions Pvt Ltd is revolutionizing the retail, CPG and manufacturing industries by giving priceless business sense to visual data feed. Streamingo helps businesses analyze the visual content generated in the consumer space to derive powerful market insights and behavioral trends. Launched in 2015 by a group of product engineering veterans from illustrious multinational companies, Streamingo is solely focused on becoming a global leader in video analytics, and hence is providing businesses with a powerful tool forged in their own house, using otherwise-unused visual content. CIO Insights engages in an exclusive interaction with Streamingo’s Founder & CEO, Vinay T.S to know more about the company’s exciting endeavors.
Artificial Intelligence is adding a new dimension to the business world by increasing the scope and with new use-cases with every passing day. Where is Streamingo positioned in the industry, and what are your target segments?
Well, the line is that Artificial Intelligence will change the world, isn’t it? The scope is infinite, and there is no sector in business or any aspect of our lives that AI will not impact in a significant way. We saw the waves of digitization and digitalization before and AI-ML-Data Science is an even stronger successor. There's tremendous amount of research being conducted in universities, institutes and companies.
On the commercial side, companies are employing AI models to capture, process and understand data that helps them understand their consumers and experiences better. With tons of data produced every second, devising innovative ways to discover insights is not a choice but an imperative decision.
Streamingo, as a deep-learning company, is focused on using video for consumer behavior studies. We are determined to becoming a leader in analysis of video data to generate insights hitherto impossible by in-depth human analyses. We are engaged in some interesting work for some of the CPG/Retail companies that have deployed our solution to perform in-home consumer behavior studies. We also work with manufacturing companies to detect and monitor compliance on the shop floor. We continue to see interest from various companies within the CPG segment to engage with us for newer models in the consumer behaviour world.
Streamingo is capable of harnessing objective data from subjective visuals. What is the operating procedure in place to understand the client's pain areas and build requirement centric solutions using these niche and advanced capabilities? What’s your USP?
Today, videos offer the best opportunity to capture actions (& consumer behavior), and if you can configure this in a real-life environment, it is a compelling proposition for Consumer Insight managers. Incorporating video into say inhouse usage testing gets you closer to your target audience without the need for expensive and time-consuming inperson observation. The natural environment offers objective data points and eliminates potential biases or discrepancies that come through traditional research methods.
On the other hand, with video data, there is always a lot of unwanted data that needs to be separated, and the target actions and objects need to be detected accurately. Streamingo has built a platform that addresses the inherentchallenges by intelligent pre-processing, efficient data transfers and accurate analyses & insights.
Furthermore, our systems are designed to constantly learn from each other, which helps us take-on additional micro-insights-study projects which we can turn around faster and at reduced costs. Additionally, with optimization of computing resources, our platform is able to process higher loads of video and at lesser incremental costs. This makes it an efficient premise to commission more consumer studies. If you ask us what the key proposition is, I would say that we have been able to quantify human behavior at scale. We have also built strong competencies in protecting PII (Personal Identifiable Information). Blurring the faces of the subjected consumers which goes a long way in security and protection of privacy is a case in point.
Given the covid-induced pandemic where human interaction is restricted, our solution offers marketeers an enviable option to continue their studies in a safe and natural environment
What are the latest challenges that Streamingo solves for its clients? Tell us about your portfolio of solutions.
Our mantra for using ‘Video as a source of truth’ has found resonance across CPG segments. While our solution has established itself in Home Care, Personal Care & Dish Care studies, our offering has now expanded to other categories like Wash Care and Laundry Care. The scope has opened-up for behavior studies that are not envisaged before.
We offer a complementing aid to ethnography studies which were so far relying on traditional methods of market research like focus groups, interviews and surveys. Given the Covid-induced pandemic where human interaction is restricted, our solution offers marketeers an enviable option to continue their studies in a safe and natural environment.
Could you tell a success story about one of your interesting recent implementations that augmented the reputation?
We have been doing studies for a CPG major for the last three years. There was this one home care study lasting three months pertaining to observing consumers going about washing their home dishes. Our in-depth study and analysis uncovered different patterns for scrubbing and rinsing activities across demographics. This resulted in a marketing decision to introduce a variant of the washing detergent which was more tuned for scrubbing rather than rinsing in line with consumer behavior patterns. The study also gave interesting insights into patterns across demographic sets of people.
What are the opportunities that you foresee and what’s the future roadmap set for Streamingo? What are the areas that you are going to invest in?
We see opportunities for video analysis across multiple sectors. From our understanding of Market Research done by CPG companies, we have observed that traditional methodologies are woefully inadequate to capture consumer behavior. We believe in the promise of companies commissioning more video studies and performing it at scale. There’s also tremendous interest in shopper insights video-based studies for capturing the shopper journey in a store.For example, aspects like brand communication, interaction with front-line staff, and customer at billing counter, and how all these play a role.
There continues to be enquiries from the manufacturing sector where process management, material & personnel movement, compliance and related matters can be tracked and monitored at scale through an efficient video system. There are use-cases in Sports, Education and so on. We continue to invest in technology, optimizing computing capabilities while building a platform that allows Data Science/Consumer Insight managers to run AI models themselves. We believe in the power of democratizing insights.
