Digital Quality Media Trends in 2024

There’s no singular path to the mountaintop of digital quality achievement. Success requires sure-footedness, clear vision and, yes, perhaps a chaperone or two to achieve business-centric goals around digital excellence. Applause works with the top brands, across industries and around the world, to help guide them on this path and reach the summit.

Our State of Digital Quality report leverages our accumulated insights from platform and survey data, as well as expert perspectives to help organizations enhance digital quality, accelerate releases and increase efficiency. For the third consecutive year, Applause investigated trends in software development, testing and quality to gain a deeper understanding of current practices and consumer expectations.

For more on The State of Digital Quality 2024 and related content, read the following content:

• Report: The State of Digital Quality 2024 report
• Report: The State of Digital Quality in Europe 2024
• Blog: Digital Quality in 2024: Trends, Traps and Transformation
• Blog: Digital Quality Retail Trends in 2024

Media industry trends

Applause experts work with the largest brand names in media around the world. The task is no small one: help deliver high-quality experiences on a wide array of devices, OSes and network types, while securing revenue against app failures, user friction, churn and payment defects.

In this blog post, some of our media experts weigh in on industry trends around digital quality. Additionally, we relied on platform data, aggregated from real customer defect data, and survey insights to paint a complete picture of the challenges rife in the industry:

• Making more with less
• Winning abroad
• Spending money to make money
• Streaming for all
• Exercising caution

Making more with less

There’s no denying it; media companies are battling for eyeball and revenue on a fierce and unstable global battleground. As competitors grow in number and global reach, profitability is less a goal than an ultimatum. Constrained resources, constant churn and a crowded marketplace all exacerbate the challenges faced by technology professionals.

One way media companies are handling this challenge is through cost optimization. Budgets are tight and, in some cases, shrinking. Internal staff then faces a heavy burden to validate the customer experience, as the scope of their testing continues to grow. As a result, some brands commonly see quality gaps, degradation of the user experience, and poor customer and device support. Resources only go so far.

“Teams have to sacrifice somewhere,” said Adrian Garcia, senior solutions consultant at Applause. “If you have less budget, your quality might also decrease a little bit. So I think these are temporary gaps that we’re seeing and consumers are going to be impacted because of that.”

Device fragmentation is a particularly difficult challenge in media compared to other verticals. Streaming media companies must not only support the massive number of handheld devices that consumers use for industries like retail and financial services, but they must also support set-top boxes, gaming consoles and smart TVs, colloquially known as “living room devices.” The longevity of these devices, glut of manufacturers and regionality of their usage makes for significant sprawl, as our platform data shows. Unsurprisingly, environment-, device-, payment- and region-specific defects occur. One year’s smart TV model might perform differently than another, or one customer’s promotional offer might differ from another’s. The math quickly works against the organization.

Device coverage

The figures in this report reflect tests across the following scope in all industries worldwide: 

“You have to start breaking it down, not only by platform but also by device type,” Garcia said. “When you start doing the computations of all the combinations of devices, payment instruments, plans and promotions that are available — it makes a huge amount of potential variables that you have to test against.”

Teams only have access to so many devices, especially as labs are limited in smart TV availability, due in large part to a lifecycle of 5-10 years per device. Inevitably, this is where contact centers see defects come in, sometimes even from executives in other countries who can’t stream their own platform. It’s crucial for organizations to actively monitor device preferences and environment-specific defects over time, then source customers or testers to validate their experiences on areas where gaps exist.

Ultimately, media brands place the most emphasis on two essential quality questions: Can the content play, and can the customer pay?

“That’s the biggest value there is, this is how these brands make their money,” said Coen Bust, director of testing services at Applause. ”It’s about the core functionality of the app working and having that validated on time.”

Fair enough, but not easily done. Content and ad validation are common avenues for defects. Is your brand adhering to streaming quality standards and licensing agreements? Content selection is a primary factor in consumers’ platform purchases. Likewise, ad delivery is a key revenue driver. Get it wrong, and they’re gone — off to a platform with a more robust approach to content and ad validation. In-market tester validation for live and on-demand programming helps mitigate the number of bugs that persist on these platforms.

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Winning abroad

Domestic competition is pushing larger media brands overseas in an effort to capture market share. Media providers lead in global market expansion, according to our survey: Media respondents indicated that 63% of organizations go to market in 1-9 countries, 23% go to market in 10-49 countries, and 15% launch in 50-plus.

Naturally, the idea is that there’s revenue to be had, but it doesn’t come without a thoughtful approach to localizing the platform and content for that regional audience. Everything from regulations around content access to payment instrument availability and cultural sensitivities comes into play in a media localization strategy.

It starts — but doesn’t end — with language translation. Media respondents claimed 77% of their apps or platforms are offered in other languages, outpacing all other industries (64%) on average. Additionally, 81% of media survey respondents — the highest of all industry verticals — indicate that they maintain a glossary of preferred translations for key words and phrases used in their apps, compared to 70% of global respondents.

Yet, while brands generally invest in validating the subscription experience or testing functionality in as many markets as possible, our experts agree there’s still work to be done to deliver well-localized experiences. In a media context, hallmarks include clear subtitles and dubbing, proper text direction, good readability, adherence to regional requirements around ad delivery, content portability, cultural sensitivities and taboos, and color symbolism.

“I’m always wondering if the localization of elements like subtitles, closed captions and available language options should be more thoroughly tested from the perspective of viewers in the target markets,” said Garcia, noting that new service tiers and product offerings only add to the challenge. “You have to test for localization across a wider range of devices. Now they have ad-driven subscriptions and games as well. So it’s all adding to the complexities they have to support if they want to have localized experiences that match their user expectations.”

Brands that fail to invest in localization miss the forest for the trees in terms of the effect a poorly localized experience can have on a market. Consider how alcohol ads or depictions might be received in the more than dozen countries where consumption is illegal. Or violent content. Or sexual content. Or whether popular regional payment instruments are accepted. There’s plenty of room for success for brands who take the time to know their audience — and just as much opportunity for failure.

Here’s the breakdown of localization bugs across all industries:

• poor translation (47.1%)
• missing translation (24.5%)
• other/general (17.4%)
• truncation & overlap (5.8%)
• corrupted characters (2.6%)

“If the quality of the application isn’t what a consumer expects regardless if they’re in the United States, Mexico, France or Australia, they’re not going to keep that subscription active,” said Ross Curley, director of sales at Applause, who helps media brands achieve their quality and localization goals. “I think they’re getting a lot of value in our international localization and in-market presence.”

Customer story: One Applause customer, a very recognizable streaming media brand with tens of millions of subscribers, needed support for its in-market launches in the EU and Latin America. Applause delivery teams supported the rollout, including some in remote regions on specific nights. Applause turned around fast results, even as releases were delayed several hours, helping the brand catch bugs early and achieve confidence in its launch.

Consider too that the challenge of adequately translating all content elements increases as the content library expands. Metadata, for example, feeds the search functionality customers rely on to find content. Some brands use automation or AI, which is accurate to a point — perhaps 80% accurate, says Bust. From there, those brands need human intervention to close the gap and ensure in-market customers get the experience they expect.

“They want the customers to have a good experience because there’s very hard competition in the market,” said Bust, whose teams deal with translating tens of thousands of pieces of content. “So you want to make sure the customer can find what they’re looking for. The metadata has to be accurate.”

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Spending money to make money

Media partnerships and licensing deals are becoming common in the industry. Brands that, years ago, nobody would expect to partner up are now combining resources, if not consolidating, in the name of profitability and strength in the marketplace. And there’s likely more to come.

“[Those partnerships] are still very relevant,” Curley said. “They’re kind of realizing that customers don’t want to have 17 subscriptions.”

This is the nature of churn in streaming media. Subscribers pick and choose the platforms they want at a point in time and abandon the ones they don’t. But to entice customers in the first place, brands must be able to accept initial and ongoing payments: easy enough until you consider the more than 2,000 different types of credit and debit cards used around the world, according to our customer data, and the dozens of e-wallets, mobile wallets and alternative payment instruments. Different markets heavily prefer some payment instruments to others, meaning teams must have strong payment flows around the world.

“[Brands are asking,] ‘What’s in a consumer’s wallet overseas? And are we confident that we can take that revenue? Or are we going to be a bad story on Variety.com?’”
– Ross Curley

Here, friction matters just as much as failure. Applause’s consumer survey revealed that 41% of respondents were extremely likely to abandon a purchase, such as a video license rental or purchase, if their preferred payment method wasn’t available. Another 35% said they were somewhat likely to abandon for this reason. But there’s not enough emphasis placed on that customer preference in product design, as only 62% of software development and QA professionals acknowledged that customer preference influenced their organizations’ accepted payment methods.

Media companies entered the streaming space and immediately took on the challenge of becoming subscription management companies — many are still playing catch-up. The bevy of payment models, bundled subscriptions and promotional offers creates a logistical headache when payments go wrong, especially for call centers already inundated with functional defects.

The key is to test with live payment instruments, not dummy cards. Media brands know this. According to our survey data, 67% of media respondents perform testing with live payment instruments, a strong number compared to other industries. What does this look like in practice for media customers?

Our media survey respondents confirmed they test the following processes — some areas more vexing than others in their popularity:

• purchase transactions (79%)
• returns/cancellations (44%)
• exchanges (44%)
• loyalty/rewards accumulation (35%)
• accuracy of purchase confirmations and receipts (33%)
• recurring subscriptions and automatic renewals (29%)
• accessible checkout processes (29%)
• calculations for taxes and shipping (28%)

Responses that generated less than 25% of the total were omitted. Perhaps most surprising is the lack of testing around recurring subscriptions and automatic renewals (29%). Garcia said that his teams typically do some testing on recurring subscriptions or payments, but also confirmed that brands are more likely to emphasize payment testing for new launches and promotions over recurring payments.

Streaming for all

Media brands are placing more emphasis on accessibility — and it’s not merely to avoid a litigious response. Curley says leading media brands have turned their attention to delivering experiences that both resonate with people with disabilities and drive revenue.

“I think there’s kind of a shift that I’ve seen, which is [toward] the empathy side of it,” he said. “There’s a value beyond just the check marks and not getting sued. I think people are starting to see there’s a revenue component type to be able to properly build a product that anybody can use.”

In our survey, 81% of media respondents said that digital accessibility is either a top or an important priority. Furthermore, 83% of media respondents say their business has an accessibility lead or equivalent. Prioritizing accessibility goes a long way toward achieving conformance, catching streaming issues like lack of audio descriptions, missing subtitles or captions, inability to adjust playback speed for users with cognitive challenges, inaccessible navigation and controls, no adaptability for screen readers and poor color contrast.

But here’s the rub. Just because media brands are emphasizing accessibility and staffing it with a lead doesn’t mean they’re investing enough resources to truly deliver accessible experiences for all, let alone achieving inclusive design, an effort that must occur across the whole organization. Case in point: only 29% of media respondents say their internal accessibility expertise or resources are adequate or better.

“What many organizations have done is place a person or a very small team of people to really drive accessibility for all of their different initiatives, which is kind of like an impossible challenge.”
– Adrian Garcia 

The survey indicates that media companies lead all verticals in deploying inclusive design principles (91%), a human-centric approach that intends to create products usable by the broadest range of people. Inclusive design involves soliciting diverse perspectives and user feedback throughout the development process. The perspective of people with disabilities (PWD) is especially useful here as the organization conducts usability audits, design reviews and in-sprint accessibility tests. And, in fact, media organizations do incorporate these perspectives, with 44% of respondents replying affirmatively that they gather those insights from PWD on staff or externally.

However the accessibility team undoubtedly needs more resources and internal support to accomplish these initiatives, which reach far beyond the scope of an individual team, person or activity.

“It’s good in one sense because they’re prioritizing accessibility, but at the same time, it’s a very demanding role and those people have very limited resources, very little authority,” Garcia said. “They’ll typically partner up with the legal team so they can at least do some kind of enforcement, but at the same time, they have to overcome engineering and design challenges.”

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Accessibility is a strategic and ethical priority for media companies, and it will need to remain one. As new standards and technologies emerge, the brands that succeed with accessibility will be the ones that programmatize their initiatives. Accessibility is a worthwhile endeavor, but an ongoing one.

Exercising caution

Media brands have adopted AI/ML technologies where the industry sees reliable use cases, which is to say, on the back end. AI-based recommendation engines and other features aid in the user experience largely out of sight of the user.

This contrasts a bit with other industries in terms of generative AI adoption and content generation. In retail, for example, generative AI can make more reliable, objective determinations based on product reviews and descriptions. Media content, however, is always growing and often subjective — consider what one person might consider a “trustworthy news source” or “thought-provoking documentary” — especially across different regions, and how a group of users or content creators might manipulate the feedback mechanisms that make those determinations.

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“I think media streaming companies are being a little more careful with implementing generative AI into their customer-facing products,” Garcia said. “I think they’re waiting for a little bit more maturity before experimenting a little more on their end.”

Our survey data reveals 50% of users have encountered biased outputs when using generative AI — a number that might be higher, depending on the user’s ability to identify the bias. Additionally, 38% experienced generative AI hallucinations or inaccuracies, while another 19% saw offensive responses.

As these LLMs become more sophisticated, however, and likely trained more deeply on content libraries, we can expect that they will become more commonplace in media, especially in content recommendations. As with other aspects of testing mentioned above, brands will need to clarify user expectations, mitigate defects in common problem areas and validate their experiences to succeed with real-world generative AI implementations.

Playing the long game

Media subscribers churn — it’s an unfortunate fact. But customer satisfaction, retention and resubscription still hold the keys to success. Your content library, bolstered by a new title or season, might attract more subscribers one month than another. Some employees remain, while others take on new roles or depart the company altogether. Consolidation too can fundamentally change your brand identity and offerings.

More than any other element in your ecosystem, digital quality is the constant. Brands that invest in high-quality experiences win in the long run, just as Applause customers see high ROI when they put the customer first. Now is the time to discuss your digital quality goals and make a difference for yourself, your organization and your brand.

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