Today's broadcasters face continued consolidation, centralization of staff, and ever-increasing pressure to improve efficiency challenges that can take their toll on quality of experience (QoE) for customers. Fortunately there are affordable, reliable, flexible solutions for remote monitoring that can help overcome these challenges. These solutions perform all-important proactive quality checks at audio/video service handoffs to ensure maximum QoE.Gary Learner
The latest generation of compact, low-cost remote monitoring solutions has an expanded range of functions such as QoE-based content monitoring with recording, remote viewing and troubleshooting of A/V feeds across linear, on-demand and interactive services. This functionality is especially important given the addition of over-the-top (OTT) and Internet streaming services content to broadcasters' already long list of services requiring monitoring.
A Complicated Monitoring Landscape
Just as content distribution has evolved in recent history from over-the-air to digital and now to OTT and Internet streaming services so too has the need for and complexity of content monitoring. It used to be that aired content was recorded and watched afterward to look for faults, which was an inefficient, tedious, time-consuming task that often took hours or even days to detect problems. It was never a practical approach, to be sure, but at least it was possible. Today, given the scope and complexity of services requiring monitoring, that manual method would be impossible even for the most well staffed, well funded operations.
The introduction of OTT and streaming services boosts the number of portals through which content can be consumed. Add to this the wide range of viewing devices PCs, tablets and smartphones and associated flavors of content they require, and the challenge of assuring the best possible experience (within the constraints of all components) can be enormous.
OTT and Streaming Services Present Special Challenges
With media being delivered directly to viewers, who might be scattered across the country or around the world, there is no longer a middleman to share responsibility for QoE. Thus every operation, regardless of size, must be able to monitor the availability and quality of services across platforms, CDNs and video service providers all from a single location in order to offer a high standard of quality. Such solutions are especially important for operations that lack dedicated monitoring staff and budgets.
Sophisticated Tools for Proactive Remote Monitoring
Fortunately the industry has already addressed remote monitoring of linear, on-demand and interactive services, eliminating the need for expensive, time-consuming manual and visual channel inspections. With these tools, broadcasters can proactively identify and respond to faults rather than waiting for customer complaints.
With media being delivered directly to viewers, who might be scattered across the country or around the world, there is no longer a middleman to share responsibility for QoE.
Advanced monitoring solutions today can scan hundreds of channels around the clock and automatically test signal integrity, issue alerts (via e-mail and SNMP), and capture the problematic content when channels do not conform to preset limits. Positioned behind the set-top box (STB), such solutions give operators a single system and location from which to access and monitor the video output continuously. Remote monitoring capabilities enable engineers to review video and audio for issues such as static or black screen, as well as errors in closed captions and audio levels.
In terms of on-demand content, today's sophisticated monitoring systems can ensure content availability and system capacity, record DPI ad insertions to prove ad conformance, or monitor interactive STB guides to ensure a customer's experience. With complete STB command access, broadcasters can perform troubleshooting more effectively and use a historical review of content and services to address intermittent yet chronic issues. Refined for intuitive use, such systems often combine familiar, VCR-like controls with color cues that clearly indicate the channels being displayed, whether they are live or recorded. Layouts and source selection are managed with simple mouse clicks, and a built-in clock facilitates navigation to the desired time stamp.
Remote monitoring technology is already deployed in applications ranging from competitive news analysis to monitoring of out-of-footprint broadcast and distribution channels. Now broadcasters are applying the technology to OTT services.
A New Challenge: Remote Monitoring for Streaming and OTT Services
Long gone are the days of monitoring the quality of a single, linear broadcast. Now broadcasters must not only assure video quality for multiple content streams in multiple formats to multiple devices, but, through OTT services, they must also deliver a personalized user experience alongside that video content. It's a scenario that effectively multiplies their outputs. On top of that, they're working with a variety of distribution platforms and might need to deliver content via a number of CDNs. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the groups of files delivered to each CDN will need to accommodate a wide range of devices, each with its own profile. It's easy to see why it's a significant QoE challenge. There is no plausible way to monitor all of these outputs and versions all the time, but today's monitoring solutions make it possible for broadcasters to institute OTT service monitoring strategies that work.
Monitoring Content at Every Key Point
The most viable monitoring strategy makes assessments at key points in the delivery workflow: ingest, encoding, packaging, delivery and distribution to
