In Broadcast - November 2015 - 78

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 11 | November 2015

InTest

Video Analytics: What You
Don't Know Will Hurt You
Kurt Michel, Senior Marketing Director at video assurance specialist IneoQuest, examines the role
of OTT and multiscreen in today's environment, and the increasing importance of video analytics...

he role of OTT and multiscreen is
increasing in importance every
day. In fact, for younger generations, it
is almost the way of consuming. Over
time, we won't distinguish a television
set from what we call 'digital devices'.
They will all simply be 'viewing devices'.
The industry's business model is in a
great deal of flux, as revenue models
continue to swing between ad-driven
and
subscription-driven
models,
potentially landing somewhere in
between for many providers. As
evidenced by the emergence of
providers like HBO Now, CBS All
Access, and Showtime Anytime, many
traditional content providers have
come to realise that they absolutely
must have a standalone digital OTT
presence.
Capturing new subscribers in this
OTT world is as easy as convincing a
viewer to click a 30-day free offer. Of
course, keeping them after 30 days is
another matter entirely. Competition
is growing as new content providers
face dramatically lower barriers for
creating their services, while at the
same time viewers gain greater ability
to easily switch among a variety of OTT
services. Providers are looking for a
competitive edge to retain viewers and
prevent churn. What are the options?
Video Intelligence & QoE
There is a saying in the industry
that "Content is King". Content is
clearly one way to differentiate.
One fascinating dynamic in the
OTT space is that providers such as
Netflix and Amazon are attracting
some of the industry's best writers,
producers and directors, by giving
them the creative freedom to produce
incredibly compelling original content.
Viewers, in particular binge viewers,
are discovering programs in the
OTT environment that they were
overlooking when broadcast in the
traditional linear fashion.
However, if content is king, quality is
queen. Chess players will understand
this immediately. In chess, the queen
is the most powerful player on the
board. Losing the queen often puts

From The Churn Zone, an IneoQuest Production

the king at high risk. In the same way,
the best content will fail to attract
viewership if it cannot be viewed.
Online viewers are a fickle lot, because
the increasing competition means they
have many options. If their video starts
slowly, looks or sounds bad, or pauses
(rebuffers) often, viewers will quickly
give up.
As a result, when a viewer is
experiencing a quality issue, their
content or service provider needs to be
able to identify the root cause - quickly
- and fix it. But finding those answers
can be a real challenge. And you can't
get that by just using measurement
software in the player. You must
understand whether the content was
prepared properly at the head end
- whether the content coming from
your origin looks good and is packaged
properly (in dozens of different
variations) to deliver to all those end
users on their different devices and
networks. Mistakes here will directly
impact the entire audience's Quality
of Experience (QoE), so catching
these issues before spending a lot of
money to deliver content that will only
aggravate the viewers is imperative.
Next up in the distribution chain is the
actual delivery of the video packets.
Measurements in this area are referred
to as Quality of Service (QoS), and
since the demands of video streams
are much higher and require more
bandwidth than pretty much anything
else in a network, the importance of
a solid QoS perspective cannot be

overstated. Finally, information can
be gathered at the end device for both
QoS and the resulting viewer response.
Only by collecting and correlating
the information collected across the
entire video distribution system can
true understanding of the viewers'
QoE be gained, allowing video business
leaders to find the answers to the
nearly infinite number of questions
that are needed to effectively drive
their businesses.
Quality & Performance Benchmarks
While all of this data collection and
correlation is essential for offering
a compelling customer experience,
it is insufficient. That data must be
converted into knowledge and insight.
For example, consider that in the
business of traditional television, the
currency, the standard that has driven
that business, has been 'viewership'
ratings. Third party validation, in the
form of Nielsen ratings, indicates how
many people were watching what
in certain demographics, allowing
the industry to establish advertising
pricing based on those ratings. Content
providers could make decisions on
whether or not they would renew a
program for the following year based
on this same viewership currency.
Not so in OTT and multiscreen. In the
OTT space, the primary measure of
content popularity is in subscriptions
and the associated revenue. An addriven model will rely on a reliable,
broadly accepted third-party Nielsen

analogue - a basic foundation of an
ad-supported monetisation system.
We are now seeing the beginnings of
that, with the recent news from CBS
and Nielsen, but there is a long way to
go before an OTT viewership currency
gains the same level of acceptance as
in traditional broadcast.
Unfortunately, for the OTT industry
as it stands today, a viewership
metric, while necessary, is insufficient.
In traditional broadcast, quality
was a given. Hence we have the
term "broadcast quality". In OTT,
quality is NOT a given. In fact, "OTT
quality" could probably be used as a
euphemism for "pretty good - usually".
Without understanding whether the
viewership numbers were affected by
quality issues that caused viewers to
switch off, the viewership numbers
may not tell the whole story, and may
actually be misleading.
Quality: An End-To-End Game
OTT has a vast opportunity to meet
the demands of global viewers, and the
technology has the potential to offer
providers far more insight into their
viewership than simple viewership
metrics ever did. But despite the
fact that those viewer demands are
driving the industry faster than many
expected, if the industry is to achieve
a level of quality and reliability that
approaches the gold standard of
"broadcast" within the complexity
of OTT's unmanaged, multivendor
distribution ecosystem, the industry's
leaders must evolve and embrace the
concept of transparent, agreed-upon
quality metrics at clearly defined
points in the video distribution pipeline
- a "currency of quality" that supports
the business models running on it. And
in this case, that knowledge truly is the
power that will propel the OTT industry
to "broadcast quality" and beyond.
IneoQuest helped the IPTV industry
with a very similar challenge at the
turn of the century, and we stand
ready to leverage that experience to
work with the OTT industry leaders
in meeting this quality challenge head
on.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - November 2015