Telestream and NPAW Focus on Video QoS and QoE Impact Analysis
Telestream and NPAW (Nice People At Work) have undertaken a partnership involving an integration between the two companies’ video monitoring and analytics platforms, YOUBORA Analytics and Telestream iQ. According to Telestream and NPAW, success in video delivery today relies largely on quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE). An operator’s ability to monitor and analyse video throughout the delivery chain is a critical element of both factors.
NPAW is a big data and video intelligence company working with video services operators. Content providers use NPAW YOUBORA Analytics session monitoring to correlate and take advantage of insights across their video platform – users, ads, content and infrastructure. Its intelligent alerting system issues alerts in context, which are useful to predict behaviour, test decisions and automate campaigns while tracking progress.
Telestream develops live and file-based systems for automated workflows, quality monitoring and video management. Telestream iQ inspects content at the headend, including encoding and transcoding processes, and surveys delivery performance across the distribution networks. It then processes and correlates this information in real time. Beyond real time it can be used for historical reporting and analysis for video quality assurance.
The Streaming Environment
Streaming live and file-based video is complex – many operations need to run exactly as planned at many isolated locations across the delivery system. Without dedicated video monitoring and analytics in between the end-points, consumers can receive poor service, and any brands involved can be damaged. Return viewer numbers may decrease and revenue lost, but connections between these outcomes and technical issues in the video may be difficult to determine.
The Telestream - NPAW partnership aims to avoid those outcomes, and in the meantime remove the silos within and between companies that make the causes of problems harder to find. It closely integrates both companies’ monitoring software so that the combined, client level analytics can be viewed on either system’s user interface, and used to better understand the video streaming environment.
When the Telestream iQ system identifies issues within a streaming hierarchy, the client can use YOUBORA to correlate the errors with fluctuations in subscriber volumes, engagement and business impact.
“With this integration, we can identify issues upstream in the video distribution chain and accurately assess how many people downstream are being affected,” said Calvin Harrison, President of the Video Quality Monitoring and Analytics Business at Telestream. “By combining iQ monitoring and YOUBORA Analytics live and file streaming business operations become more precise and therefore predictable and controllable. A customer will know that they lost a portion of their audience and they will be able to attribute this loss of a specific fault within their delivery chain.”
QoS, Impact Analysis and Monetisation
Through this integration, Telestream and NPAW can work with customers at other levels within their organisation apart from the technical engineers who maintain network QoS and QoE. For example, the data generated from the combined system can help sales and marketing teams, who also follow viewer response to video services and experience, make smarter decisions faster on their network system.
"The partnership between Telestream and NPAW reflects the fact that content providers and telco operators need to understand more precisely and correlate the performance of their full streaming architecture – from encoding to packaging to CDN origin, and every single CDN node – with the end-user experience," said Sergi Vergés, COO and co-founder of NPAW.
"Extracting data from the device ecosystem is difficult because of internal complexity and the persistent use of proprietary systems. Because YOUBORA Analytics and Telestream's iQ both collect information outside the device or at the end-user level, the impact of playback issues caused across the entire delivery chain can be identified and assessed. YOUBORA's ability to process and analyse data adds a layer of business intelligence to help content providers make data-driven decisions, optimise platform performance and engage users." www.telestream.net
