How Vidio brought more locally relevant video-on-demand (VOD) content to Indonesian users through Google Search

Published on June 4, 2024

About Vidio

Vidio is one of Indonesia's largest over-the-top (OTT) media services established in 2014, which is part of Elang Mahkota Teknologi (Emtek) media conglomerate. Vidio has over 1M videos in their catalog, with the aim to increase and offer more content across diverse genres for Indonesian users.

Implementing VideoObject structured data

In a market where local language (Bahasa Indonesia) is important, Vidio aims to provide local content on their catalog and make it discoverable on Google Search for Indonesian users. To achieve its objective, Vidio implemented VideoObject markup to their existing catalog without having to change their video file type (M3U8 format, following HLS protocol), as they were already using a supported video file type.

However, M3U8 can be challenging for Googlebot to properly crawl and parse due to the way the file format works. The file format is a map that references the parts that make up the whole video object, which means in order to play the full video, the client has to stitch the parts back together. One of the challenges is that Googlebot could run into an inaccessible file referenced by the M3U8 file, causing the entire video byte-fetch to fail. To avoid fetch issues, Vidio implemented stable URLs for each video file and made sure they are accessible to Googlebot.

They also followed other Google Search Central video best practices, including:

• Adding the appropriate contentUrl property
• Validating that the markup has been implemented successfully using the Video enhancement section of the URL inspection tool

The results

Within a year of implementing VideoObject markup, Vidio saw improvements in impressions and clicks on their video pages. While the number of videos that Vidio published from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023 increased by ~30%, adding VideoObject markup made their videos eligible for display in various places on Google. This led to an increase of ~3x video impressions and close to 2x video clicks on Google Search. Vidio also used the Search Console video indexing report and performance report, which helped them to identify and fix issues for their entire platform.

"Vidio is the foremost OTT platform in Indonesia, and optimizing our videos on Google has been incredibly valuable to video content searchers. Our data shows a remarkable growth in video impressions and clicks, which demonstrates our commitment to providing top-notch user experiences," added Hermawan Sutanto, Managing Director at Vidio.