TVBE Sept Supplement_final

www.tvbeurope.com
September 2015TVBEurope Supplements
In association with
PREVENTING CHURN
101
Videointelligence
Video Intelligence Delivered
TVBE Sept Supplement_final.indd 24 28/08/2015 12:39

Supplement
ii TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com September 2015
in association with
OTT and multiscreen in
today’s environment
T
he role of OTT and multiscreen is increas-
ing 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 ‘devices’.
The industry has really turned a corner as the
predominant revenue model continues to pivot
from ad revenue to subscription revenue. In my
mind, this became a tipping point in the industry,
when many content providers realised that they
absolutely had to have a digital OTT presence.
Interestingly, this is putting more pressure on
the broadcast side of things, because there is
an increasing opportunity for churn as existing
barriers to switching providers have lowered. In
the past, if I signed up for a cable subscription,
I would sign a long-term contract and make a
commitment to that provider for an extended
period of time. In contrast, now I have the oppor-
tunity to pay for content on a monthly basis. If I’m
not happy with my online service provider, I can
easily switch: immediately. I can take advantage
of a 30-day free trial, and if I’m not happy with
that, I can go to another 30-day free trial. Add
the number of content providers coming into the
mix, and the fact that there are only so many
viewers out there, and it’s easy to see that cus-
tomer churn is a huge concern in the industry.
Improving the multiscreen
experience, reducing viewer churn
One of the fascinating dynamics in the OTT
space is that providers such as Netflix and Am-
azon are attracting some of the industry’s best
writers, producers and directors by giving them
the creative freedom to produce incredibly
compelling original content. And viewers are
being asked to vote. Viewers, in particular binge
viewers, are discovering programmes in the OTT
environment that they were overlooking when
broadcast in the traditional linear fashion.
So if content availability is not an issue, what is?
I believe it’s the quality of the viewer experience.
What the industry needs is an awareness of the
quality issues that viewers are still dealing with
and an understanding of that in the context of
the OTT space. For example, if you think of the
business of television, the currency, the standard
that drove that business was ‘viewership’ and
ratings. There was third-party validation, such as
Nielsen ratings, to indicate how many people
were watching what in certain demographics,
so the industry could establish advertising pricing
based on those ratings. Content providers could
make decisions on whether or not they would
renew a programme 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 populari-
ty is in subscriptions and the associated
revenue. And a reliable, broadly accepted
third-party Nielsen analogue – a basic
foundation of an ad-supported monetisation
system – does not yet exist.
It’s not that Nielsen, along with others, isn’t
trying to do that. By way of example, after a
significant event such as a World Cup or Super
Bowl, when the numbers are announced by the
rights holder/broadcaster the next day – ‘Oh
this was a huge game, a huge event and we
had, in the case of the Super Bowl here in the
US, 110 or 112 million viewers who watched on
broadcast television’ – that number is
established by Nielsen and everybody agrees
on and understands what that means. Then they
say, ‘and we also broke the record of having 2.3
million unique visitors over IP, based on our
measurements.’
If the OTT industry is going to support an
ad-driven business model similar to that of
broadcast television, they need the visibility and
transparency that only an objective third party
can provide. We simply are not there yet.
Video analytics
whatyoudon’tknow
willhurtyou
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
‘Ifyoureallywantactionableinsights,to
knowwhatindividualviewersarewatching
andwhy,youneedvisibility,transparency
andaboveall,intelligenceaboutwhatis
happeningtocontentateverylinkinthe
videodeliverychain’
Kurt Michel

TVBEurope iiiSeptember 2015 www.tvbeurope.com
Supplement
in association with
Viewership validation is one area where I think
OTT needs to catch up to broadcast, but it’s
important to note that OTT viewership numbers
require some critical context to have the same
kind of weight as Nielsen ratings. That context is
the quality of the viewer experience. Traditional
broadcast leverages a purpose-built network,
made expressly for video content, which is much
less complex than multiscreen OTT. This OTT distri-
bution complexity adds quality risk which the in-
dustry continues to wrestle with. And that means
that viewership numbers must be filtered through
a ‘delivered quality’ lens. As an example, if
you’re a content provider collecting real-time
viewership numbers – made possible through
digital distribution – you can see that you have
a million viewers; but then half way through the
event or content you lose 25 per cent of them.
Something is wrong. But what is wrong? Why did
they abandon? Why did you lose them? Did
the audience lose interest in the content, or did
the playback quality degrade? Did they switch
off, or drop due to buffer issues? Did you lose a
certain region, or local network, or device type?
And if so, why? Maybe it was because
a poorly packaged advertisement was
inserted into the stream, and it created
playback issues. Or maybe some part of
the network started behaving badly and
the picture started to pause or become
blocky, or ‘pixelated’, making the
content unwatchable.
Without understanding the quality issues,
without understanding that the viewers were
experiencing re-buffering or poor picture
quality, without that context, the viewership
numbers are not meaningful.
Video intelligence and quality of
experience
If you find you have a quality issue, you need
to be able to identify the root cause. The root
cause is the answer to the ‘why’ questions, and
finding that answer is the real challenge. And
you can’t get that by just using measurement
software in the player. You also need to under-
stand the quality of content (QoC); 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. 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. By collecting and correlating the infor-
mation collected across the distribution system,
true understanding of the viewers’ quality of
experience (QoE) can be gained, and the video
business leaders can find the answers to the
nearly infinite number of ‘why’ questions that are
needed to effectively drive their businesses.
Quality: an end-to-end game
If you really want actionable insights, to know
what individual viewers are watching and why,
you need visibility, transparency and above all,
intelligence about what is happening to content
at every link in the video delivery chain. Every
step, from where it originated, throughout the
entire network, and ultimately to each individual
device’s playback software, contributes to the
quality of the experience. Traditional broadcast
networks built in this capability. It is part of the
‘broadcast quality’ foundation.
OTT has a vast opportunity to meet the de-
mands of global viewers. Those demands are
driving the industry faster than many expected.
But if we are to achieve a level of quality and
reliability that approaches the gold standard of
‘broadcast’ in the complexity of an unmanaged,
multivendor distribution ecosystem, the concept
of end-to-end analytics with clear demarcation
points and key quality indicators must be em-
braced. And those key quality indicators and the
knowledge gained would be made accessible
to the video business operators, resulting in a true
‘currency of quality’. And in this case, that knowl-
edge truly is the power that will propel the OTT
industry to ‘broadcast quality’ and beyond. n
‘Withoutunderstandingthequalityissues,
withoutunderstandingthattheviewerswere
experiencingre-bufferingorpoorpicture
quality,withoutthatcontext,theviewership
numbersarenotmeaningful’

Supplement
iv TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com September 2015
in association with
T
he OTT industry is being propelled forward
at a rate that few, if any, in the industry
expected. It is being driven primarily by
viewer demands, and the industry has respond-
ed with new innovations in compression and
delivery, faster device development, and an
explosion of available content.
Meanwhile, viewer expectations for quality,
set over 50 years by the broadcast industry,
present an enormous challenge for the online
video sector. OTT is also trying to address some
of the same challenges that the broadcast
industry faced over that half-century, but in less
than a decade. For example, the functional
silos in the traditional distribution network have
been supplanted by multiple vendors providing
services together in the unmanaged media
distribution path. In addition, consumer driven
growth continues. According to Ray Gilmartin
of Akamai Technologies, publisher of the State
of the Internet report, “We are estimating that
in order to meet the future quality expectations
for OTT as video progresses to 4K and 8K, the
industry will require 1000x the capacity it has
today. Given this projection, the challenges are
daunting to ensure the future of broadcast-like
experiences for OTT.”
In this context, all of them spoke to the need
for a more flexible, more open multi-vendor distri-
bution ecosystem balanced with and defined by
clear demarcation points.
More importantly, however, was their unani-
mous agreement on the need for open, accessi-
ble KPIs (key performance indicators) supported
by consistent and transparent quality measure-
ment at every one of these demarcation points
in order for the system to deliver on the enor-
mous business promise of OTT video.
Keith Wymbs of Elemental Technologies told
TVBEurope: “Consumers don’t stand still. We
must meet their expectations, and the only way
to do that is via a software-defined video (SDV)
approach that allows the industry to change at
the speed of viewer demand.”
Deepak Das of VisualOn noted that there is a
“shared responsibility of everyone in the ecosys-
tem to create appropriate handoff mechanisms
with specific criteria to handle the complexity of
the OTT delivery system.”
These and other leaders in the OTT industry are
working to improve their respective domains
within the streaming distribution pipeline. In-
creasingly, they are leveraging software-based
solutions that support the rapid innovation that
has driven the success of OTT thus far. However,
this next stage in the maturity of OTT as a viable
business model will require greater collabora-
tion to improve video quality and consistency
across the system as a whole. The lynchpin: an
agreed-upon set of standards for quality at each
stage of the pipeline. n
TVBEurope spoke to three major players in the OTT end-to-end
video distribution space: senior management from Elemental
Technologies, representing video processing and origin services;
Akamai Technologies, representing the content delivery network;
and VisualOn, representing device video player technologies.
Each gave their perspective on how the industry can drive toward the
broadcast-quality viewer experience their audiences expect in the brave
new world of OTT, and the role that ecosystem partners play in that growth.
‘Viewerexpectationsforquality, set
over50yearsbythebroadcastindustry,
presentanenormouschallengefortheonline
videosector’
OTT and video quality
Wherecontent,complexityand
viewerexpectationscollide
RayGilmartin
seniordirector,product marketing,media,
AkamaiTechnologies,thegloballeader in
content deliverynetwork(CDN)services
KeithWymbs
chiefmarketingofficer
ElementalTechnologies,theleading
supplierofsoftware-defined video
solutionsformultiscreen content delivery
DeepakDas,senior director of marketing
VisualOn,Inc.,amultimediasoftware
companythat enables videoand audio
acrossconnected devices

How did IneoQuest become
involved with the OTT sector?
I
neoQuest [IQ] has been around for about 14
years. We spent the first eight years producing
the first video-quality assurance solutions for
IPTV and cable video deployments, and in that
time we worked with the majority of the leading
telecommunication and cable companies
around the world. Some of these companies
were the pioneers in adaptive streaming video
deployments, and asked if we could help them
to learn why some services weren’t working.
Since we offered video analytics at that point,
we applied the tools we had to see what we
could do. We put our probes and solutions in
place, put our best engineers on the problems,
and eventually developed a new set of metrics
that actually started to make some kind of sense
out of the issues facing HTTP delivery of adaptive
video, such as start-up problems and critical
delivery timing of the video packets.
As a result of these early collaborations, over
the last six years we have become a leading
provider of service assurance and analytics
solutions for adaptive media delivery quality.
We work with the majority of the operators today
with video headends and across the HTTP deliv-
ery system to provide end-to-end monitoring of
those services.
What do you see as the
main challenges in the OTT
sector today?
I like to think about this by relating back to the
architecture of IPTV. If you look at the original lin-
ear IPTV video delivery via broadband or cable,
it was all end-to-end MPEG transport streams. In
that system, you can you look at MPEG packets
all the way through the network – whether on
ASI at the headend, in the IP core network or
going over the last mile DSL, cable or whatever
it happens to be. But with HTTP-based adaptive
video, the model is completely different. The vid-
eo starts in one original format, and is converted
into many different forms based on what device
the viewer is using, the software/apps on that de-
vice, the quality of the connection it has, and the
demands of the content itself. Converting and
managing all of these different formats, bitrates,
and protocols can introduce unique, complex
problems. To complicate things further, between
the content delivery networks (CDNs) and the
viewer devices there are multiple different types
of broadband access networks; so the video
could be carried via cable, xDSL, fibre (xPON), a
public Wi-Fi or WiMax infrastructure, or over a mo-
bile infrastructure using 3G, 4G or LTE. And then
of course there is the domestic Wi-Fi network,
which is often used to extend these other access
network connections within the viewer’s home.
All of these different ‘last mile’ technologies
have the potential to affect quality levels and
viewer experience.
We have basically moved from a world of
controlled video delivery where everything was
managed by one or a few entities from the hea-
dend through the core network, the broadband
pipe and out to the set-top box, to a world of
multiple different networks (the internet), vendor
silos, protocols, technologies and bit rates of the
same video stream to many, many devices. It’s
a huge change that is constantly increasing the
complexity of delivering video.
How are you speciﬁcally
addressing those challenges?
For the past few years, we have been applying
our understanding of packet-based video
measurement to create tools and services
that provide an end-to-end perspective for
HTTP adaptive video streams, with a focus
on the unique needs and quality indicators
across different parts of the delivery chain.
Supplement
vi TVBEurope www.tvbeurope.com September 2015
in association with
To discuss IneoQuest’s perspective on the world of OTT,
and the likely road ahead for the wider video industry,
TVBEurope sat down with the company’s VP of corporate
strategy, Stuart Newton
Overthetop,
intothefuture

TVBEurope viiSeptember 2015 www.tvbeurope.com
Supplement
in association with
The headend or ‘origin’ is the first part to get
right because if you don’t, every viewer will
be affected. So we started by developing OTT
headend solutions which can monitor and
compare the incoming and transcoded bit
rate streams, and then we moved our focus
to the needs of publishing points, post-origin,
intra CDN, post cache, and then eventually
produced a cloud-based active testing solution
post CDN. Over time we have expanded these
passive monitoring and active testing solutions,
and recently added the ability to collect video
quality analytics and viewer response from
the end device’s player itself, completing our
portfolio’s end-to-end measurement capability
across the video delivery network.
Why are video analytics a core
requirement for OTT?
Video analytics are a core requirement for any
video delivery service, whether it’s IPTV, cable,
satellite, or OTT. Without them, the provider is
flying blind. Video will reveal issues in a network
like no other data: it is extremely time-sensitive,
whether linear or adaptive. If you don’t deliver
video in a precise fashion to keep the end-play-
er buffers full, viewers will get a black screen,
rotating rebuffer symbol, or another fault that
makes people complain (often in social media),
demand their money back, or in arguably the
worst case, simply cancel their subscription. It’s
an absolute imperative to have the ability to
gather video analytics from the end-to-end of
the chain of video delivery.
More recently, as the industry has matured,
advanced customer experience management
(CEM) is gaining increased attention. Video ser-
vice providers want to put a much stronger focus
on reducing churn and improving their brand
recognition for video delivery. To do that, they
need a much better view of which customers
are affected and when. Being able to profile
the audience – and any individual viewer expe-
rience – in real time across different geographies
based on network, device, player, and many
other factors leads to much more efficient, timely
problem resolution.
Are broadcasters giving
enough serious thought to their
multiscreen services? Are they
missing out on opportunities to
monetise their offerings?
I think broadcasters are giving a lot of serious
thought to this, and many have been playing
with multiscreen services for the last few years.
It’s evident to me from some of the services that
I’ve seen – and in conversations with colleagues
and friends – that you get a very clear picture,
very quickly, about which services are good and
which aren’t. You can see the broadcasters that
have put a bigger focus on it now. Some of
those broadcasters have been offering these
additional OTT/multiscreen services for free until
now, but as they improve the quality and start
rolling out other content, they are going to
want to charge for it.
In fact, last year I gave a presentation on mon-
etising the video experience. It was about the
monetisation cycle where you really need to do
the service assurance and ensure the delivery of
the content before you can go on to fine tuning
the content, advertising, and providing addi-
tional services. And this is a dynamic problem,
because as you are attracting new subscribers,
you affect the performance of the delivery infra-
structure. It requires awareness and infrastructure
flexibility. And we have found over the years is
that the biggest concern for many operators is
how to deliver the video with the right quality
consistently. Even though they want to know who
is watching on what device in order to better
monetise, it is all a waste of time and money
if the viewer’s video quality is poor. Consistent
delivery quality is always ‘step one’.
We have seen several content providers and
operators who were initially focused on obtaining
the behavioural data measurement tools who
rapidly performed a U-turn and refocused on
operational service assurance data as a priority.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a huge
learning curve for the OTT industry, resulting in
greater focus on quality assurance. So we offer a
comprehensive analytics solution: both foun-
dational service assurance tools, as well as the
audience behavioural tools.
Looking to the future: where
will this sector be in three to ﬁve
years’ time?
It’s going to be fascinating. I don’t think the rate
of innovation is going to change; potentially, it’s
only going to increase. I think there are three ma-
jor topics that video is going to be affected by,
and be attracted to, over the next few years.
The first is advanced customer experience:
making sure you reduce churn, generate ex-
cellent brand awareness, and provide the best
experience you can. I think real-time analytics
will be key to enabling that kind of future.
Secondly, network-function virtualisation (NFV)
is going to be realistically deployed in a two to
five-year timescale. If video service providers
want to provide future services that are going
to be highly adaptable and dynamic, then NFV
is certainly going to be employed alongside
software-defined networking (SDN) for video
services. Again, real-time analytics is going to
be a critical part of the control and feedback
loop to enable that.
On a third level, there is the enormous fore-
casted growth of video over mobile. The mobile
operators deliver a lot of free OTT content today,
but as the amount of premium content grows,
customer expectations will rise. Those mobile op-
erators will need the same level of visibility as the
traditional IPTV and cable operators to ensure
solid service delivery and SLA compliance.
These three areas are not mutually exclusive. If
you’re a video service provider, you will need to
be delivering HTTP-based video over mobile and
fixed infrastructures in the next several years. You
will be affected in both fixed and mobile by the
move to NFV and SDN, and there is only going to
be increased pressure on customer experience
management. We are evolving for all of these,
and have solutions to cover all three aspects as
they start to converge and merge.
It will be an exciting future. Any one of these
topics is a huge consideration in itself. As a com-
pany, we’ve embraced a significant number of
new technologies and capabilities in virtualis-
ation, mobile delivery and analytics in order to
prepare: it’s certainly going to be an interesting
few years ahead. n
“Asacompany,we’veembracedasigniﬁcant
numberofnewtechnologiesandcapabilities
invirtualisation,mobiledeliveryand
analyticsinordertoprepare:it’scertainly
goingtobeaninterestingfewyearsahead”

Experience is Everything
Today’s video viewers expect a high-quality experience on every
device they use, anywhere they choose to use it – no matter how
it gets delivered. That’s why the world’s leading content providers
choose IneoQuest for their video quality assurance solutions.
Only IneoQuest can monitor, detect, and help quickly pinpoint
quality issues across the entire video distribution chain - from source
content to every viewer’s device - and everywhere in between.
Viewer satisfaction matters, and no one has your viewers’
experience covered like IneoQuest.
www.ineoquest.com
VisitIneoQuestat
IBC
atStand
3.A23
Hall3

TVBE Sept Supplement_final

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (18)

Similar to TVBE Sept Supplement_final

Similar to TVBE Sept Supplement_final (20)

TVBE Sept Supplement_final