By: Paul Casinelli
Today’s consumers can’t get enough video. As traditional broadcast TV viewership continues to grow, consumption of Internet and mobile video is rising at an outstanding rate. Over 75% of global consumers watch video content over the Internet via connected devices such as computers, smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs. Furthermore, the growth rate of video traffic over the Internet is truly explosive, estimates state it will reach 58% percent of total Internet traffic in 2015. With internet and mobile traffic increasing at such an impressive rate, multiscreen video and Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming technologies are firmly placed at the center of this video everywhere transformation.
Assuring Video Quality is Different
Today, most service providers realize that they must assure the quality of their linear broadcast video services separately from voice and data. This realization is due to the fact that subscribers are more sensitive to video issues. With the network complexities and higher transmission rates, video is more prone to error than voice or data. It requires an entirely unique set of tools, strategies and analysis to be properly managed and delivered with high quality.
With a comprehensive video service assurance solution, providers gain real-time insight into the performance and quality of the video services within their networks. Providers can proactively pinpoint issues in the network and fix them even before the customer experience is negatively impacted. Not only does this reduce OPEX by decreasing truck-rolls, mean time to repair (MTTR), and call volume, it also improves the subscriber’s experience. Reducing churn and increasing revenues places video service assurance at the foundation of their business model.
The ABR Technological Revolution
The main challenge for Internet and mobile video arises in keeping constant video play-out at the end-client device because of the varying nature of bandwidth limitations in an unmanaged network. Adaptive bitrate streaming technology and the ABR techniques, such as Adobe HDS, Apple HLS, and Microsoft Smooth Streaming, address this challenge, allowing providers to offer their subscribers video services anywhere, anytime. Adaptive Streaming video employs an entirely new set of technologies, methods and strategies that require a new suite of tools to assure a high quality viewer experience. Adaptive Bitrate technology provides a method to encode a video asset (live or on-demand) into several files of varying quality and bitrate. From there, each video file is segmented in smaller file chunks. When enough bandwidth is available, the highest quality video asset will be delivered. The file chunking provides the ability to switch to a lower bitrate file as the bandwidth diminishes. By adapting to the available bandwidth, this process, along with protocol communications, allows the video to constantly stream uninterrupted by buffering instances.
