Called SmartANALYTICS 3.0, the product has evolved to measure various aspects of QoS experienced by users accessing mobile services from smart phones, tablets and other portable wireless devices. But with such services increasingly including video, Birdstep has seen an opportunity for exploiting its measurement capabilities to provide information of interest to video service or app providers for longer term market development, such as breakdowns in viewing on the basis of content, devices, network or location. At the same time the platform can provide real time analytics for monitoring QoS and troubleshooting.

“Vendors of video apps are discovering that their products are only as good as the underlying service infrastructure,” said Lonnie Schilling, Birdstep CEO. “We’re now focusing on video as well as telephony so that we can give app providers the control and insights over the underling networks and crucially of the client devices themselves.”

One of the key differentiators for the product, according to Schilling, lies in its ability to gather information from the devices as well as from the networks, in order to yield a complete picture of quality and performance as experienced by the user. “Our proposition is to combine knowledge of the device with visualization and the ability to bring in multiple sources of information and correlate that,” said Schilling. “Then we’re allowing multiple constituencies to use our tools to correlate and visualize different sources of information. This includes TV operators, who now have the ability to collect and process information from mobile devices and integrate it into their larger analytics propositions.”

This comes at a time when pay TV operators have been deploying TV Everywhere to multiple screens, including mobile devices accessing video content over both cellular and Wi-Fi infrastructures. They already have good sources of data about service quality and viewing behavior from their existing walled garden infrastructures and also increasingly from devices directly connected to fixed broadband services. The missing piece is mobile TV, which means operators no longer have an accurate picture of overall video consumption, with implications both for service development and revenue generation from advertising in particular. It means the traditional currency for trading adverts is becoming devalued.

This position is unsustainable given the rapid rise in video consumption on mobile devices, not just at the expense of traditional TV but also fixed devices such as PCs. In the US, time spent viewing on desktops and laptops was almost flat in 2014, according to the latest data from digital media market research firm eMarketeer. But on mobiles it is leaping ahead, at an average CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 81.1% for smartphones and 119.8% for tablets over the last four years.

That is why the likes of Birdstep envision a new market for their analytics platforms in TV outside their traditional mobile operator markets. One difference with mobiles is that the viewing experience is dominated by apps rather than browsers. For this reason Birdstep is targeting third app providers with an SDK (Software Development Kit) enabling them to access its product suite including SmartANALYTICS.