In Broadcast - NABSHOW 2015 - 82

82

www.inbroadcast.com | NAB SHOW 11-16 April 2015 | InShow Guide

Keeping an Eye
on OTT Services
By Andrew Sachs, VP Product Management

R

ecognising the shift
of media consumers
from television viewing to
the watching of movies and
other entertainment content
on smartphones, tablets, and
other mobile devices, the
broadcast industry has begun
migrating towards provision
of over-the-top (OTT) services.
The Internet has emerged as
an increasingly viable and
attractive means of delivering
content, and by launching
OTT services, broadcasters
are seizing a new opportunity
to extend their reach to
include a larger audience,
spread across a much greater
geographic area.
Though the move into IP-based
content delivery opens the door to
revenue-generating OTT and Internet
streaming services, it also comes
with new challenges. Consumers can
access OTT content from a multitude
of sources on a multitude of devices,
and with a wealth of options at their
ﬁngertips, they are prone to abandon
any source that doesn't offer the
experience they desire. Rather than
provide feedback or complain about
service quality, as they might have
with traditional broadcast services,
most consumers will simply move
on to another OTT service provider.
For broadcasters and other content
providers working in the OTT space,
this trend has intensiﬁed an already
competitive marketplace.
To ensure that they are delivering
high quality OTT services, operators
are extending monitoring to include
Internet-delivered content. In addition
to monitoring the set-top box (STB)
experience, they are monitoring and
ensuring quality of experience (QoE)
across the full service portfolio.
Conventional
monitoring
of
linear broadcasts only required the
monitoring and logging (recording)
of a single output. Now, however,
the monitoring of Internet-delivered
content demands continual evaluation
of multiple new outputs, each of
which may be distributed in dozens

OTT-capable monitoring solution ingests content from each point in the OTT pipeline

of versions. The enormous array of
viewing devices - computers, tablets,
and smartphones - and associated
"ﬂavours" of content they require,
present a very different monitoring
challenge. What's more, operators
must account for new factors, such as
the limitations of supporting networks
and devices, with the potential to
compromise the viewing experience.
Networks, video service providers,
and
broadcasters
around
the
world have recognised the value in
implementing an always-on solution
for logging and monitoring their
conventional services, and they are
turning to the same technology -
Volicon's Observer platform - for
monitoring of the OTT services.
Employing the same suite of content
capture and analysis tools already
proven for STB and transport stream
(TS) monitoring, Observer OTT
technology offers a complete, costeffective quality monitoring and/
or compliance logging solution for
multiplatform media delivery.
Since this OTT-capable monitoring
solution ingests content from each
point in the OTT pipeline, including
all variety of target mobile devices,
it not only provides a valuable
representation of how consumers
experience streamed content, but also
offers the operator data that helps to
accelerate identiﬁcation and resolution

of any quality issues for content
viewed on any device.
To provide a comprehensive picture
of service quality, this type of solution
takes a two-pronged approach that
focuses both on the "device" and the
"cloud."
In monitoring the device experience,
the solution allows operators to
validate the streams sent by the
operator against those received
via speciﬁc target devices. This
functionality also allows the operator
to conﬁrm the integrity of content
being consumed across geographically
distributed locations, even without
access to the direct feed from the
content delivery network (CDN). To
simplify the testing of streaming media
applications across mobile devices and
computers, the solution allows users
to interact with the actual devices and
applications being examined.
In monitoring the cloud experience,
operators can consume content
directly from the CDN, and use it
to evaluate quality of service. The
operator can monitor and analyse all
renditions of content being delivered
by the CDN, using these inputs to
conﬁrm the integrity of audio and
video, and to validate compliance with
captioning and loudness regulations.
Rather than verify actual devices, the
user can gather the data necessary to
make sure that its streaming services

are properly available on
the CDN. SNMP and email
alerts can be set up to notify
engineers
automatically
if any fault is detected.
As they examine logged
content,
operators
can
take advantage of loudness
measurement,
logging,
and graphing tools; frameaccurate DVR functionality;
and an array of options
for clipping and exporting
content recorded, either
from the device or direct
from the CDN.
By eliminating the need for
manual checking of viewing
devices, a costly and labourintensive process, and by
providing greater visibility into the
full OTT pipeline, new electronic OTT
service monitoring technology offers
operators an efﬁcient, affordable,
and highly scalable means of ensuring
quality of service. With this capacity,
operators can be conﬁdent that
the quality of experience for their
OTT services is a competitive asset,
rather than a liability that costs them
potential customers.
About Volicon
Volicon is the leading provider of
enterprise media intelligence solutions
serving the needs of broadcasters,
networks, cable operators, and
governments worldwide.
As the broadcast and cable industry's
most efﬁcient, reliable, and costeffective automated multi-channel
video content logging and monitoring
system on the market, Volicon
provides monitoring, logging, and
streaming solutions for compliance,
loudness, media analysis, content
repurposing, competition monitoring,
Web logging, ad veriﬁcation, ratings
monitoring, mobile access, central
and remote monitoring, and quality of
experience.
With headquarters in Burlington,
Massachusetts, Volicon serves its
customers with a dedicated team of
partners, resellers, and distributors
worldwide.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.volicon.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw9CBgZh9Gc
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