Volicon CTO Gary Learner on Ensuring Quality of Service With End-to-End OTT Monitoring
Earlier this month, Volicon CTO Gary Learner wrote an editorial for The Broadcast Bridge in which he talks about the modern day challenges that face broadcasters when it comes to ensuring quality of service when it relates to OTT media sources.
Applied Technology: Ensuring Quality of Service With End-to-End OTT Monitoring
By Gary Learner, Chief Technology Officer, Volicon
Broadcasters are moving into the streaming realm to take advantage of the opportunities it presents to reach a larger audience and, in turn, monetize premium and unique content more broadly. A wealth of over-the-top (OTT) media sources makes for a highly competitive marketplace, though, and it has become critical that broadcasters differentiate their offerings by ensuring exceptional quality of service.
In doing so, broadcasters face the challenge of monitoring not only the broadcast output, but also the many new outputs they distribute for viewing on computers, tablets, and smartphones. In addition to accounting for every version of this content, each with its unique bit rate and format, broadcasters must establish a means of understanding how the consumer's quality of experience is affected by the networks and devices that facilitate delivery and viewing. Looking beyond its own quality standards, the broadcaster also must ensure that OTT content adheres to applicable closed-captioning and loudness regulations.
While these challenges indicate the need for logging (recording) and monitoring across a broadcaster's complete lineup of offerings, across all outlets and platforms, the reality is that if they can be practically implemented at all, manual approaches to OTT service monitoring are costly and even cost-prohibitive. For many broadcasters, automated monitoring is the only feasible option. Volicon has introduced Observer OTT to address this need. The new solution makes OTT monitoring a simple and affordable extension of common the workflow and infrastructures used by broadcasters worldwide.
Volicon's Observer OTT provides networks, video service providers, and broadcasters with a straightforward solution for logging and monitoring their OTT services. Employing the same suite of tools already proven in set-top box and transport stream monitoring applications, the solution offers a complete, cost-effective quality monitoring solution for multiplatform media delivery.
Rather than continually monitor all of a broadcaster's outputs in every version, this approach monitors selectively at ingest, encode, packaging, and delivery, examining audio and video, as well as metadata. This capability helps the broadcaster to confirm the integrity of files packaged for various CDNs and platforms. As regulations regarding descriptive video and captioning in Internet-delivered versions of broadcast content continue to be adopted, broadcasters can depend on the product to aid them in ensuring that all of their services are compliant with the latest government requirements.
Moving further down the chain, the broadcaster can use the monitor for active sampling of outputs delivered via the most popular platforms and formats, as well as for alternative round robin examination of the lower, middle, and upper bit rates across Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and Adobe HDS formats. Ingesting and logging this content from a variety of mobile devices, the Volicon solution demonstrates how consumers experience streamed content and makes a recorded history of that stream readily available to support the isolation and troubleshooting of any quality issues. Interacting with the actual devices and applications being examined, the solution also enables users to confirm that the apps used to access content are functioning properly and providing optimal quality of experience.
By automatically aggregating and supplying rich data about content packaged for and delivered via OTT services, a proper monitor serves as a robust yet cost-effective solution for maintaining consumer's viewing experience across a wide array of devices and streaming media applications. The product addresses each point in the OTT pipeline to help ensure the integrity of media files and to enable broadcasters to understand how consumers experience streamed content.
Though the broadcaster cannot control the entire distribution chain, the OTT monitoring solution does give it the power to detect issues that threaten the viewing experience and determine whether the cause stems from its own activities, or whether they are a consequence of other factors influencing the distribution chain. By taking advantage of OTT service monitoring from ingest to device, the broadcaster can distinguish the quality of its content and services in a crowded - but possibly very rewarding - media marketplace.
To view the article: Click Here
Most recent headlines
04/08/2024
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, is excited to announce Santiago Solanas as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO)....
03/06/2024
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, a...
28/04/2024
Mediahaus delivers the first SRT live-streaming sports production over 5G with U...
27/04/2024
On April 26, L3Harris Chair and CEO Christopher E. Kubasik joined CNBC's Mor...
27/04/2024
PORTLAND, Oregon Audinate Group Limited, the developer of the Dante AV-over-IP solution, announced significant new additions to Dante Connect, its cloud-based D...
27/04/2024
TORONTO Bell Media has launched 10 English and French-language FAST channels featuring entertainment, factual, news, and sports programming. The new free stream...
27/04/2024
An extensive new analysis of the news segments in the broadcast evening news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS has found that broadcasters devoted most of their...
27/04/2024
GERMANTOWN, Md. EchoStar's Hughes Network Systems has opened a new manufacturing facility and private 5G incubation center in Germantown, Maryland....
27/04/2024
Harry Pappas, one of three brothers who founded Pappas Telecasting Companies in 1971, died April 24. He was 78 years old....
27/04/2024
ATLANTA and LONDON Mexican telecommunications and broadcast company Televisa has selected Synamedia for an overhaul of its broadcast distribution....
27/04/2024
Participate in the Survey - The Impact of AI on Media and the Creative Industry
Pascal Wagner April 26, 2024
0 Comments
By participating in this surve...
27/04/2024
SDVI Rally Access Workstation Earns Two Top Awards at 2024 NAB Show
Brie Clayton April 26, 2024
0 Comments
SDVI, the leading platform provider for clo...
27/04/2024
Berklee's Music and Health Institute Launches Community Health Musician Cert...
27/04/2024
Charter Communications reported higher first-quarter profits despite continued cord-cutting and competition for broadband customers....
27/04/2024
Two environmentally-focused groups are partnering to engage the unscripted TV world in finding better ways to address climate change. Reality of Change is an ec...
27/04/2024
Sarah Garcia has been promoted to weekend anchor at KTLM McAllen, Texas, known as Telemundo 40. Starting April 27, she will anchor Noticias Telemundo 40 weekend...
27/04/2024
CBS Sports said it launched a new 24-hour free, ad supported streaming television (FAST) channel devoted to the UEFA Champions League....
27/04/2024
Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts received $35.4 million in compensation in 2023, up 11% from the previous year, according to a proxy statement filed by th...
27/04/2024
Art Happens Here With John Lithgow, which sees the actor study dance, ceramics, silk-screen printing and vocal jazz with students in Los Angeles, debuts on PBS ...
27/04/2024
Remember Leave It to Beaver? Bewitched? Dragnet? When cable ratings were rising?...
27/04/2024
Next up for the weekend binge at Catchy Comedy is Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Every weekend, Catchy Comedy features The Catchy Binge, a marathon of a classic sitcom....
26/04/2024
Sundance Film Festival CDMX 2024 kicks-off today with screenings in 5 theaters in Mexico City and the opening-night film, FRIDA, directed by Carla Guti rrez...
26/04/2024
[Editor's Note: This interview is part of a larger feature about the women d...
26/04/2024
Once again this year, SGL Carbon opened its doors to interested children and young people. On the occasion of the German Girls and Boys Day, which took place on...
26/04/2024
Orders1 of $5.5 billion; book-to-bill of 1.06x
Revenue of $5.2 billion, up 17%,...
26/04/2024
Five Considerations For Communications Modernization In The 21st Century
In the digital-enabled battlespace, the Joint Force needs to shoot, move and communica...
26/04/2024
CBS Sports has launched Champions League as a new, 24-hour streaming channel that will serve as the year-round destination for nonstop highlights of the UEFA ...
26/04/2024
Despite tough competition in the streaming space, Roku reported solid results in Q1 2024, beating revenue expectations, with total net revenue up 19% YoY to $88...
26/04/2024
LONDON AND TORONTO Pinewood Toronto Studios has appointed Sarah Farrell as general manager of the Studios in downtown Toronto....
26/04/2024
Quantum to Offer Advanced Filesharing Technology and Performance in StorNext and...
26/04/2024
FilmLight Colour Awards welcomes 2024 entries and introduces new Emerging Talen...
26/04/2024
Picture Shop Announces Chris Evans as Head of Unscripted
Brie Clayton April 26, 2024
0 Comments
Picture Shop announced Chris Evans will lead Unscripte...
26/04/2024
Participate in a Survey - The Impact of AI on Media and the Creative Industry
Pascal Wagner April 26, 2024
0 Comments
By participating in this survey,...
26/04/2024
Toy maker Mattel said it is working with Samsung to launch its first free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels later this year....
26/04/2024
Trusted Media Brands (TMB) said it named Marty Moe as president....
26/04/2024
Ron Howard is the director on Jim Henson Idea Man, a documentary that premieres on Disney Plus May 31. Henson of course created Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Big...
26/04/2024
The ice continues to melt under the regional sports network business as the Seattle Kraken of the National Hockey League have made a long-term deal to broadcast...
26/04/2024
Heading into the upfronts, Warner Bros. Discovery said it launched Olli, a first-party data platform advertiser can use for converged, targeted advertising camp...
26/04/2024
CBS has renewed the drama The Equalizer, which will see season five on in 2024-2025. Queen Latifah stars....
26/04/2024
The CW has entered into an exclusive multiyear broadcast partnership for the Miss USA Pageant and the Miss Teen USA Pageant. The 73rd Miss USA Pageant will air ...
26/04/2024
Fuse Media isn't mincing words in a campaign urging its young viewers to register and participate in the 2024 elections....
26/04/2024
Dead Boy Detectives, a series from Neil Gaiman about a detective agency staffed by ghosts, debuts on Netflix April 25. George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri are in t...
26/04/2024
The Story Collective has gradually repurposed the former Mortlake Brewery to include production offices, workshops and sound stages
By Matthew Corrigan
Publi...
26/04/2024
Perkett joins the company following a 25 year career in product management, product marketing, engineering and user experience (UX) across multiple industries
...
26/04/2024
Teradek, the industry leader in wireless video transmitters and receivers, announced today the launch of new Bolt 6 LT 750 and Bolt 6 Monitor Module 750 RX with...
26/04/2024
NEW YORK Amagi has appointed Richard Perkett chief product officer (CPO)....
26/04/2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has announced the results of the 2024 NAB Radio and Television Board of Directors elections. The...
26/04/2024
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. & NEW YORK Mattel has announced a deal to launch its first three 24/7 free ad supported streaming (FAST) channels on Samsung TV Plus, Samsung...
26/04/2024
PORTLAND, Maine Viewers here can now receive the NextGen TV signals of five local stations with the launch of ATSC 3.0 service from host station WPFO, which is ...
Volicon CTO Gary Learner on Ensuring Quality of Service With End-to-End OTT Monitoring
