In Broadcast - December 2017 - 45

45

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 7 - Issue 12 | December 2017

InMedia

Ensuring The Quality
Of Streamed Content

Jason Friedlander, Director of Marketing at Verizon Digital Media Services,
argues that deployment of sophisticated real-time monitoring tools is essential...

B

roadcasters that fail to maintain
compliance with FCC rules run
the risk of damaging their brands
and, if they must throw money back in
the form of fines, taking a hit to their
monetisation strategies.
Monitoring tools that are now
standard
in
the
conventional
broadcast realm enable broadcasters
to ensure that they are delivering
content that meets both regulatory
requirements and licensing contractual
obligations. With effective monitoring,
broadcasters avoid fines and preserve
ad revenues.
Now, as traditional broadcasters
move into the OTT realm, monitoring
plays an additional and even more
important role: enabling the content
provider to assess and maintain
the viewer's quality of experience.
While taking advantage of familiar
monitoring and quality assurance tools
via the video player, content providers
can also manage the stream itself,
looking at buffering rates, start-up
times and other factors that influence
the user experience. Monitoring
tools tailored to internet-based video
delivery are proving critical to OTT
content providers' ability to gain a
competitive edge, but as the industry
moves forward into OTT becoming the
majority, the perfect toolset is one
that combines both the traditional
broadcast monitoring and the client
side OTT monitoring technologies.

Analytic Tools
Adaptive bitrate streaming
technology has dramatically
improved the viewer experience,
and at this point, most OTT
service providers work with
mature technology that yields
about the same quality level.
No matter the provider, services
tend to fall into a fairly good
median space. Thus, moving
forward, broadcasters working
in the OTT realm must employ
tools that offer insight into
factors such as buffering times,
captions, ad insertion accuracy
and video and audio quality, all
of which are key to delivering
the highest quality rendition
possible to each viewer.
Rather than wait for analytics
to come back from the video
player of a specific user so
that they can see how their
content is playing out across
the globe from an actual visual quality
perspective, content owners need to
establish monitoring infrastructure
that facilitates real-time monitoring of
streams.
As broadcasters expand their OTT
offerings, they must be able to rely
on data about these aspects of their
services. They put a great deal of trust
in their vendors and staff to adhere
to FCC rules, regional limitations, and
other practices for which even small

Real-time
monitoring
overview

missteps can cost thousands of dollars
in fines or penalties. The broadcaster
must have the proper monitoring tools
on the day of a live event so that it can
be confident that what's going out to
each user is doing just that.
Monitoring Content
Within today's OTT content delivery
workflows, monitoring has a vital
role to play in advertising, as well.
Say a broadcaster doing a C3 load,
placing back the broadcast ads for the
first three days it runs a programme
and then, on the fourth day, puts in
dynamic ads, they need to monitor
that for contractual purposes.
Content providers can see numerous
advantages in detailed monitoring of
their streams and in the ability to see
how those streams perform, region by
region, in real-time.
Delivery Complexity
Despite the fact that they rely on
infrastructure that has been mature
for quite some time, conventional
broadcast stations continue to need
monitoring systems that help them

avoid FCC fines for non-compliance,
which can extend into tens of
thousands of dollars. Mistakes still
happen. The dynamic nature of OTT
streams and how they are stitched
together and delivered introduces a
greater level of complexity and the
potential for more issues if they are
not being monitored correctly.
While OTT publishing represents
a new outlet for distribution and
appealing opportunity for further
revenue generation, content providers
getting into OTT also must deal with
complex new delivery infrastructures
and the task of assuring the integrity
and quality of content through
distribution to the target device.
Given the financial and competitive
advantages that advanced monitoring
brings to OTT services, it won't be long
before deployment of sophisticated
real-time monitoring tools becomes
commonplace. So, broadcasters, why
not start now? Don't wait until you're
forced into it. Get monitoring - for
compliance and quality of experience
- into your workflow now, and start
seeing the benefits.
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://www.verizondigitalmedia.com/
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - December 2017
