Broadcasters are moving into the streaming realm to take advantage of the opportunities it presents to reach a larger audience and, in turn, monetize premium and unique content more broadly. A wealth of over-the-top (OTT) media sources makes for a highly competitive marketplace, though, and it has become critical that broadcasters differentiate their offerings by ensuring exceptional quality of service.

In doing so, broadcasters face the challenge of monitoring not only the broadcast output, but also the many new outputs they distribute for viewing on computers, tablets, and smartphones. In addition to accounting for every version of this content, each with its unique bit rate and format, broadcasters must establish a means of understanding how the consumer’s quality of experience is affected by the networks and devices that facilitate delivery and viewing. Looking beyond its own quality standards, the broadcaster also must ensure that OTT content adheres to applicable closed-captioning and loudness regulations.

While these challenges indicate the need for logging (recording) and monitoring across a broadcaster’s complete lineup of offerings, across all outlets and platforms, the reality is that if they can be practically implemented at all, manual approaches to OTT service monitoring are costly and even cost-prohibitive. For many broadcasters, automated monitoring is the only feasible option. Volicon has introduced Observer OTT to address this need. The new solution makes OTT monitoring a simple and affordable extension of common the workflow and infrastructures used by broadcasters worldwide.

Volicon’s Observer OTT provides networks, video service providers, and broadcasters with a straightforward solution for logging and monitoring their OTT services. Employing the same suite of tools already proven in set-top box and transport stream monitoring applications, the solution offers a complete, cost-effective quality monitoring solution for multiplatform media delivery.

Rather than continually monitor all of a broadcaster’s outputs in every version, this approach monitors selectively at ingest, encode, packaging, and delivery, examining audio and video, as well as metadata. This capability helps the broadcaster to confirm the integrity of files packaged for various CDNs and platforms. As regulations regarding descriptive video and captioning in Internet-delivered versions of broadcast content continue to be adopted, broadcasters can depend on the product to aid them in ensuring that all of their services are compliant with the latest government requirements.

Moving further down the chain, the broadcaster can use the monitor for active sampling of outputs delivered via the most popular platforms and formats, as well as for alternative “round robin” examination of the lower, middle, and upper bit rates across Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and Adobe HDS formats. Ingesting and logging this content from a variety of mobile devices, the Volicon solution demonstrates how consumers experience streamed content and makes a recorded history of that stream readily available to support the isolation and troubleshooting of any quality issues. Interacting with the actual devices and applications being examined, the solution also enables users to confirm that the apps used to access content are functioning properly and providing optimal quality of experience.

By automatically aggregating and supplying rich data about content packaged for and delivered via OTT services, a proper monitor serves as a robust yet cost-effective solution for maintaining consumer’s viewing experience across a wide array of devices and streaming media applications. The product addresses each point in the OTT pipeline to help ensure the integrity of media files and to enable broadcasters to understand how consumers experience streamed content.

Though the broadcaster cannot control the entire distribution chain, the OTT monitoring solution does give it the power to detect issues that threaten the viewing experience and determine whether the cause stems from its own activities, or whether they are a consequence of other factors influencing the distribution chain. By taking advantage of OTT service monitoring from ingest to device, the broadcaster can distinguish the quality of its content and services in a crowded — but possibly very rewarding — media marketplace.