CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptvideovideo-streaming
Etienne
Etienne

Reputation: 183

Tracking video plays

We have our own media player built in Javascript and I was wondering if you had any suggestions on best practices for tracking video plays. Up until now, we had a PHP script proxy the download and increment a counter with each play but I am thinking there has to be a better way.

The more research I do, the more it seems like looking at log files is the most reliable way to do so but we won't always have access to log files.

Is a Javascript pingback my only alternative?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 525

Answers (1)

Brad
Brad

Reputation: 163438

To appropriately monitor useful video playing metrics, you need to watch it client-side. That way, you can track:

  • Whether the video was actually played
  • How long the video was played
  • If the viewer skipped ahead
  • If the sound was muted
  • If the video player was even visible in the scroll pane
  • etc.

Have some JavaScript fire off a small AJAX call, or similar, and send the data back to your analytics server that way. You will get far more useful information with this method.

Upvotes: 4

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