Faultline has previously pointed out that probably the three best players in the video playback analytics space right now are IneoQuest Technologies, Conviva, and S3 Group. This week two of these have made announcements, with IneoQuest launching a new analytics platform, and Conviva entering the advertising analytics space for the first time, as well as a flurry of similar moves this week from players big and small.
Network monitoring specialist IneoQuest, has launched its new FoQus platform, as an extension of its data and analytics solutions product line to enable OTT and IPTV video providers to gain an insight into playback quality and viewer behavior. IneoQuest recently made a brave move to the edge of the network to test ABR quality, which is far from where it earned its stripes in physical network probes, but it is suggesting that a key area where its system is useful is in selecting encoder suppliers in the first place and then in tuning them. It is one step away from the holy grail, which is testing the streams in real time and adjusting encoding parameters in real time to fix any problems.
Live streaming is making waves, particularly on social media platforms, so an important component of the FoQus platform is the FoQus|Event service for streaming live events over the internet – this tests the video distribution system prior to the event as well as monitoring the performance quality during the stream, using Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure. The new platform is available in both appliance and virtualized software packages for use in NFV, SDN, and cloud-based environments.
IneoQuest has been claiming that it has been gaining traction for the past two years now, and its latest announcements have certainly caught our eye, and likely also the eye of any operator that has already put trust in IneoQuest’s physical probes. But the company may not be sufficiently convincing to the wider community, which has no IneoQuest investment to protect. It remains unclear how big IneoQuest really is, although it does boast a customer list featuring some monster names such as AT&T, Comcast, BT, Charter, Deutsche Telekom, DirecTV, PCCW, Sky, Telefonica, Verizon, and Vodafone.
Other players have similar services to IneoQuest, but what it does is combine its new software with the existing network probes and other in-network measurements –to build an end to end video quality system. This is a congested market and the StormTest product line from S3, acquired last year by Accenture, is one such player which tests quality for each type of device, aiming to tackle real time video quality. Another rival analytics platform provider Conviva tests what arrives at each device and seems to have strong market share as well – Time Warner Cable being one major customer.
Now it is Conviva’s turn to take a change of direction, with the announcement this week that it is launching into the advertising space for the first time. The product, Ad Insights, is a separate service extension to its popular Insights analytics solution, which enables publishers running live and VoD streaming services to monitor advertisements and enhance ad performance. It has also teamed up with FreeWheel to monitor ad impressions in real-time to report user experience and engagement metrics for both video advertising and content.
Faultline recently spoke to Keith Zubchevich, CSO at Conviva, who explained that Ad Insights is all about understanding ad fatigue (i.e. when the audience sees an ad more times than intended and the click-through rate drops as frequency rate increases) by monitoring frequency, placement, and duration – and how these KPIs correlate with video engagement.
We pointed out that Time Warner Cable, one of Conviva’s largest customers, has recently launched its very own advertising campaign performance measurement tool called KernelConnect. However, we were assured that Conviva isn’t about to be booted out of the TWC door and Ad Insights will be working in tandem with KernelConnect, in a “creative aspect”.
With the increasing popularity of ad blocking software, this is a subject that we could not avoid talking about with Conviva, so it was interesting to find out that app performance data for viewers using ad blockers is something that is monitored in the newly formed partnership with Freewheel – but could not provide any figures for how prevalent usage really is. This is a trend likely to intensify and make a big dent in ad revenues, unless advertisers rapidly improve the personalized targeting of ads.
Advertising remains a key monetization method for media companies, as the model for a successful streaming service must encompass both models of ad-supported and paid, and the use of intelligent technology behind advertising campaigns will be vital in the battle against the ad blockers. Zubchevich claimed that Conviva has presence in around 2 billion unique devices in approximately 500 to 600 different media players, gathering data from more than 50 billion video streams annually.
Put simply, a CMS can display what content it was asked for, when it was asked for it, and on which device. Whereas the network probes such as the traditional IneoQuest appliances and Conviva’s analytics system, can show if the data arrived, when it arrived, and in what form it arrived. The end user device can then tell you if the device played it perfectly without buffering, or not – the three components need to be united in a single analytics space to make sense of all of them.
Another player in the analytics space is Paris-based Witbe, which is more traditionally focused purely on service performance, network monitoring and QoS. This week Witbe has extended its partnership with French pay TV provider Canal+, using its Witbe Video Robots to perform network and QoE tests as a real end user, using up to 32 HD set tops in parallel, and over the DTH, terrestrial, IPTV, multi-ISP, and OTT in xDSL or FTTH architectures.
The Witbe Smart Altering System then reports real-time alerts and KPIs for all linear TV services. Witbe’s robots are essentially software emulating user behavior, such as renting a movie as well as simply watching TV. The robots can report on user experience based on Mean Opinion Scores (MOS), or perhaps the video specific successor PEVQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Video Quality). The robots can be implemented on a dedicated appliance or increasingly as a virtual machine.
Other similar announcements this week come from the likes of CDN giant Akamai, which has opened up a new Broadcast Operations Control Center (BOCC) specifically for the delivery of OTT content, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The center will employ around 50 people specializing in technologies for quality assurance, analytics, and real-time measurement tools.
NeuLion has launched its new analytics service OTT Dashboard at NAB, to enable content providers to view metrics showing real-time feedback on the performance of their OTT and TV Everywhere businesses. Also at NAB, Tektronix has unveiled its new decryption and decode functionality for the Sentry ABR video quality monitoring platform. Another player in Swedish Agama Technologies has this week been selected by M7 Group to provide its service assurance solutions for M7’s video services across Europe, in partnership with Dutch systems’ integrator Stream Group.