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
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
31/08/2025
Legrand | AV, a global specialist and industry leader in audiovisual solutions, returns to CEDIA Expo 2025, taking place Sept. 4-6 in Denver, with a powerful li...
31/08/2025
Global media technology company Backlight will unveil new capabilities in its Iconik, Wildmoka, and Zype product lines at IBC2025 (booth #1.D09), September 12 1...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
Volicon CTO Gary Learner on Ensuring Quality of Service With End-to-End OTT Monitoring
