A stone’s throw from its headquarters in Barcelona, local video analytics outfit Nice People at Work (NPAW) has become a staple at Mobile World Congress with the rise of mobile-first video, joined by an increasing number of vendors jostling for space. We learned however that some significant recent entrants may already be struggling.
In a long overdue catch-up, NPAW outlined its roadmap to Faultline Online Reporter last week, talking about the convergence of video analytics for IPTV and OTT. Having spent months building up a project for Telefonica in Latin America, the first company to deploy its YouBora analytics product on IPTV, announced in April last year, the vendor says the time has come to replicate the system with other telcos.
Telmex and Orange Spain are already in the process of “blending OTT and IPTV,” we were told – capturing the same video analytics experiences but for very different methods of video delivery – while before the two operators were purely analyzing OTT.
The length of the Telefonica project and the apparent rarity of such blending is due to the complexities in IPTV, NPAW explained, in that if one small element of an IPTV system goes down, the entire system breaks. As IPTV came in (circa 2004), we began to realize that the problems were with data, either it was interfered with by something physical, a wire not performing to spec, or a break, or there was too much data to squeeze through some part of the managed network, or there was jitter caused by any number of reasons. In those days, a Quality of Service protocol was a simple set of traffic lights, deciding which traffic had preference and which data got held up or thrown away. Many IP protocols were written afresh in that era, such as IGMP for branching or multicasting, and the two-way nature of each connection was enough to at least send requests automatically when things went wrong.
NPAW’s last announcement was back in September, when it launched a new algorithmic prediction and growth analysis tool called Users. This functions as a dashboard displaying the churn rate of new users and growth of inactive users – pitched at C-level execs and operational teams. NPAW also had an OVP (Online Video Player), but the company is now fully focused on its YouBora analytics platform and big data developments are crucial going forwards, focusing on the processing and slicing of data for full visibility.
So, when a CDN behemoth enters the space with its own QoE measurement capabilities, smaller vendors like NPAW should in theory have obvious cause for concern about getting customers poached. Perhaps the company’s biggest claim during our conversation then was that a share of Akamai analytics customers have moved over to NPAW’s YouBora product due to unsatisfactory results. This migration has sparked murmurs in the industry that Akamai is on the verge of halting the development of its QoE technology, which was only ever launched to make its CDN sell more easily, so we will keep an eye on Akamai’s analytics movements throughout 2019.
However, we know Akamai is just as happy working with other telemetry services and is unlikely to shift into churn reduction or a data warehouse, although its data can be used to populate these. It has a global understanding of this market and says that there are point products from other vendors throughout Asia Pacific, including China.
An oxymoron of a comment was made by NPAW last week, stating that in its own experience at MWC, there are very few telcos actually present. This unexpected conclusion prompted us to cite the vendor’s number one rival Conviva, which recently put out a report suggesting something similar, that connected TV devices, such as dongles and other streaming set tops, are on the verge of overtaking mobile for share of the streaming video market. Rather than agree or argue against it, the simple response was that rather than compare the two devices, it should try comparing OTT and IPTV.