Test & Measurement Feature | Subscriber Analysis
MEASURED FOR SUCCESS
There are many benefits to deploying a robust hybrid or multi-network video services strategy, as part of an operator focus on the subscriber’s quality of experience and also strong component of an operators competitive profile.
Steve Christian Vice President of Marketing, Verimatrix
A truly integrated multi- network video service needs to be built around at least three core technical components – a coherent service interface and presentation layer, a harmonised revenue security approach, and a comprehensive approach to instrumentation.
Integrating these techniques into a successful overall deployment can present many challenges. For instance, while there are many over-the-top (OTT) delivery services that can offer customer usage data for streamed or downloaded content, such services are not particularly useful for today’s generation of advanced hybrid or multi-network operators, which require more sophisticated data regarding how subscribers are using the service as a whole.
To get that bigger picture, the operator requires services that can “connect the dots” between traditional delivery mechanisms and internet mechanisms of delivery.
To do this effectively, the service should not only aggregate the subscribers’ rights to content across different devices and delivery networks, but should also collect similar usage and quality
20 | May/June 2013 |
ibeconnects.com
Steve Christian | Verimatrix
Steve Christian, vice president of marketing for Verimatrix, explores the hybrid network strategy in more detail, with an emphasis on the latest advances in test measurement and subscriber analytics.
metrics for each different format variant of every identifiable piece of content.
Consider for example, a consumer watching the last ten minutes of their network television programme on their iPad. The operator would likely be interested in knowing where the subscriber watched the first portion of the programme, and their motivation for switching devices. Was there a gap in time, or did they just relocate (move from their living room to their bedroom, for example)? The asset IDs and time values between those two mechanisms of consumption must be integrated in order to provide a comprehensive “snapshot” of the usage patterns of the whole service.
This information can be extremely valuable for operators as they refine and expand their service offerings. To obtain it, however, requires a harmonised instrumentation across multiple networks to make sense of the overall consumer behavior.
Measuring for Success: which metrics are best?
Digging down a little deeper, the challenges of multi-network instrumentation seem themselves to group into addressing at least three levels of abstraction.
The lowest level of abstraction is likely to be consumption metrics - what content is being viewed and for how long. Understanding what
is and isn’t popular is an essential bedrock in helping the operator determine both its linear and on demand content offering. Such metrics in OTT are often collated by server side instrumentation, but when trying to correlate linear and on-demand consumption a client side approach is likely to be more powerful.
The next level of abstraction is likely to be related to quality of delivery, for example, gathering intelligence on the pattern of delivery bandwidth, latency, and faults. When an operator is trying to understand what isn’t working as well as it needs to in a network, client devices can be a valuable source of intelligence as to how the network is functioning, especially the key aspects of
Historical media usage and
subscriber pattern analysis allow operators to implement better network planning, customer preference and service targeting data.
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