Are CDNs Hitting Their QoE Metrics Goals?
Learn more about CDN quality at Streaming Media's next event.
Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media West, B104. Fireside Chat: The State of the CDN Market, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Dom Robinson:What's the story with quality on CDNs? Are you hitting the quality metrics that you're hoping to hit or are you still working to achieve those quality levels? Where's this quality story at in the QoE experience?
Matt Smith: It's an evolving process. You're always challenging yourself to do better, you're never gonna hit 100%, you're never gonna start as quickly as you'd like. So yes, it's almost like what's the acronym I'm looking for, your measureables, your KPIs and things like that. So, you know, you set a goal quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year to say, "We want Video Stars to be this percentage better than they were last year." And we're on track with those and we're on track with delivering with the number of failed starts lowering and lowering. It's a continual process, but you're always evaluating that. Like I say, you're never gonna be 100%. If you are, you're not doing something right. So you could ask that question next year and it'd be the same thing, right? We're always looking to improve and as some of these folks have said, we do have technological advances that help move those metrics up. So maybe the delta between perfect and where you're at is smaller. But it's a continual process. When we work, nobody cares. When we fail,
Dom Robinson: Everyone talks about it.
Peter Chave: Everyone talks about it. But a lot of times, it's not even, you can be the best deliverer, you can be delivering the segment's video at the right time or the right manifest. But it could be--you gotta look at the whole thing holistically, which is everything from your user's journey into their experience, you know. If they're coming to a webpage, where's that webpage being served? Well what are the APIs that support that? Are they all secured behind the same kind of infrastructure? In a multi-CDN architecture, is everything being fed through that same matrix or is there a single point of failure? Point example, recently off-services going down that cause you to not even get to the content. The content plays fine if you can get to the actual page with the content on it. So, quality, and you're always judged by your last event. We did a very big soccer tournament and we had 100% ingest, no ingest whatsoever. So next time, 100% is the high-water mark, it has to work perfectly. It's a continuous evolution, you have to keep checking yourself. We use a variety of tools, not just our own. We use a lot of other metrics and third parties to try and pull together the most coherent picture and then provide our data in real time back to customers to help make that decision. It's an arms race, a continuous one. It'll be very hard to--it's part of the fun in this challenge.
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