In Broadcast - April 2015 - 48

48

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 4 | April 2015

InMedia

Keeping A Close Eye On
Over-The-Top Services
Andrew Sachs, VP of Product Management at Volicon, says Over-The-Top provision demands that the
customers' quality of experience is viewed as a crucial asset...

R

ecognising media consumers'
shift 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
toward 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.

"...the monitoring of
Internet-delivered content
demands continual
evaluation of multiple
new outputs, each of
which may be distributed
in dozens of versions,"
Andrew Sachs
Volicon

Volicon's Observer Capture module aids OTT device monitoring

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.
Viewing Array
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 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,
cost-effective quality monitoring and/
or compliance logging solution for
multiplatform media delivery.
Because 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 "cloud".
Stream Validation
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; frame-accurate 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 labour-intensive 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.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.volicon.com/solutions/platforms/observer-ts
In Broadcast - April 2015

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