Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 - (Page 74)

review Gomez Active Streaming XF By Tim Siglin Gomez Active Streaming XF solution solves a niche need that was previously available from only dedicated streaming monitoring solutions and leverages the fact that Gomez has long been considered a leader in the website-performance-monitoring game. It needs refinement, but it’s a step in the right direction. Price: Subscription fee starts at $2,000 per month For more information, contact: www.gomez.com Reviewing a reporting system is somewhat akin to herding cats, as it requires you to describe a system that changes multiple times each second. However, while this may be difficult, it is also necessary given the growth of streaming on the web and the desire to continually improve delivery of streaming content. There are other streaming measurement systems on the market, but Gomez’s entry is noteworthy for the massive groundswell the company has in web application measurement. Gomez performs more than 4 billion measurements per year and uses more than 40,000 “internet experience measurement points” to test various static and dynamic pieces of content as part of what the company calls its ExperienceFirst (XF) Network. For this review, we’re going to look at the new Gomez streaming tool, Active Streaming XF. This isn’t to be confused with Gomez’s first foray into the world of multimedia measurement, Actual Experience XF That tool, . which measured the experience that a web user encountered when using a browser to access streaming or progressive-download Flash content, used a series of ActionScripts that could be written into a Flash SWF that would report back quantitative data, regardless of the user’s location. By contrast, Active Streaming XF measures content as it passes by a series of nodes. Gomez currently has nine nodes available across various content delivery networks (CDNs) in locations throughout the U.S. and in London. These nodes, which the company hopes to expand to about a dozen by year’s end and more by mid-2009, are designed to measure the performance of high-value streams and validate the performance claims of hardware vendors or CDNs. Gomez positions Active Streaming XF as a way to judge the efficacy of a CDN prior to purchase. In some ways, the scenario is a Catch-22 for a CDN. Choosing not to use Active Streaming XF is, according to the company, akin to 74 STREAMING MEDIA December 2008/January 2009 bypassing the BBB of the Better Business Bureau. Why, the logic goes, would any CDN not want to have their content measured unless they’ve got something to hide? Tactics and positioning aside, a reporting system on streaming measurements may also let a customer objectively manage service level agreements, rather than constantly monitoring their own sites or hearing about outages from customers. Another reason that both user-experience and quality/ performance measurements are needed is because of the lack of Quality of Service (QoS)-enabled networks. With broadcast on cable or over the air (OTA), the system is designed to handle one type of media delivery. An Ethernet network and, indeed, many of the wide area network (WAN) delivery mechanisms are what are termed “best effort” networks that often give equal weight to various data types. So a short explanation of QoS is that of a technology to manage prioritization and routing. Because of this, QoS technology looks not only at bandwidth measurements but also network conditions (such as congestion or availability of bandwidth) so it can prioritize traffic accordingly. This is especially important for latency-sensitive packet routing for voice or video if the same network is also delivering FTP database , email, or other non-QoS-aware large-file transfers. Without QoS, then, these node-based or embedded reporting systems are very important, and it will be several years before QoS tools fully make it into streaming. In fact, Windows Media Services for Windows Server 2003 uses the less-reliable Type of Service (ToS) and doesn’t take advantage of routers and WAN transports that have Figure 1. Active Streaming XF’s main reporting window shows play and buffer times, as well as connect time and DNS time. http://www.gomez.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 Table of Contents User-Generated Politics Netflix Needs a Business Model Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers Improving Video Color Quality What Makes for Compelling Video? Game On: Bringing the NHL to IPTV Give! The New Era of Corporate Communications New Video Frontiers: Taking It Beyond the PC The HD Showdown: Codec Vendors Battle It Out for Supreme Quality The Ultimate Guide to Creating Online Video Content That Works, Part 2 Planning for Webcasting Success: Considerations for Deploying an Enterprise Video Communications Platform All Mobile Devices Are Not the Same Datmedia Datpresenter LSI Tarari Encoder Accelerator LCPX-6140 Gomez Active Streaming XF Transcoding for Global Reach Executive Visions 2009 The Revolution Is Being Televised

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

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