Seeing is Believing - Video CEM
By verifying and optimizing video content distribution, advertising, and promotion, service providers can confirm impressions, verify placement, identify and correlate viewership patterns, and optimize promotion by becoming context-aware based on location, device, and video content.
Making the Most of What You’ve Got
There have been significant changes to the communications industry over the past decade, but none so pronounced as the personalization of connected products and services. As video services are added to the mix, service providers must understand access methods, devices, applications and usage to make sense of what customers want and how best to deliver video services. And all of those devices, services, and customers have an effect on the revenue stream, profitability, and infrastructure investment.
But how do we know what customers want, when they want it, how much they will pay and how they might avoid paying? How do we ensure that partners and content providers are compensated fairly for only those components that they provide, and how do we make the most of existing infrastructure and systems?
Whether video is delivered traditionally or over-the-top, service providers are responsible for the quality of the product. If operational and behavioral data can be captured from the source through various network elements, caching points, and switching points, then service providers can gain a finely-detailed view of experience and understand where various network and service elements may require further optimization. Deploying video probes and analytics parallel to the network at these important touchpoints enables service providers to track individual video streams across physical, virtual, and partner infrastructure to better understand where bottlenecks exist and where capacity can be recovered.
Using adaptive video streaming and understanding the capability of infrastructure to deliver a quality video viewing experience over WiFi clouds, broadband, or mobile networks is critical in determining where network expansion and augmentation should occur. This information also provides insight as to what charges should be leveled to partners and content providers, as well as pricing guidance for new or high performance services. As virtualization and software defined networks (SDN) are rolled out in the public network, dynamic delivery of video services is only possible if operators are using real-time analytics to understand the quality of both existing configurations and proposed dynamic adjustments.
The application of analytics to data of any kind is not just a technical challenge that can be thrown over the wall to IT. Every service provider has access to the same technology. To deliver value, business and executive leadership must be engaged to ensure that the tools are solving business problems and delivering business results. That requires more than budget; it requires time and resource commitment from subject matter experts, executives and partners both inside and outside the business. Those individuals are the ones who will determine the ultimate value of video service assurance and analytics.
Video quality assurance is only one phase of monetization. To really maximize the revenue streams in the future, networks will need to dynamically adjust to shifting loads and varying service requirements. Collecting, correlating, and acting upon operational and behavioral video analytics enables better tuning of the networks, management of churn, creation of new revenue-generating services, improved efficiency, and targeted advertisement insertion.
When it comes to video, quality is in the eye of the beholder. Understanding the experience begins with knowing what the viewer is seeing, and that knowledge provides the power to leverage the video content to its maximum potential.
