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Best Practices for Live Stream Monitoring

Learn more about streaming quality monitoring at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media West, DT102a. Monitoring Live OTT Services is Critical for Service Assurance, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Anupama Anantharam: Based on our experiences with live stream monitoring, if you look at the typical streaming media workflow, there are about four to five important touchpoints. So let me walk you through that.

The first one is video transcoding. This is where you are taking your main video file and creating multiple profiles to meet your customers at the resolutions. Here is where the video goes through a lot of transformations. You might have selected a new transcoding render, and anything really can go wrong. So this is a very good place to to do your quality monitoring.

Another touchpoint is once everything is transcoded, when the packager creates a manifest file and packages these different videos after you apply your DRM, so that only those users who are entitled to watching the video can get access to that content. That happens at the packager level and then everything is made available on the origin server the right in the middle.

Here is where your origin server is. This is basically the big start of your delivery point and then from there, of course, CDN. Some companies have their own delivery networks and many companies resort to a third-party vendor like a CDN to make sure that their content reaches their end customers.

So there are these three four main touchpoints, and this is where content is going to be manipulated, changed. These are handoff points where things can go wrong.

Also, I want to mention that adaptive bitrate technology for delivering broadcast TV is still relatively new. Most of our customers are used to traditional linear delivery where everything is in your control. You had your MPEG-2 transport stream, and mostly MPEG-2 video or H.264 video was used for compression. And then you had a dedicated network that made the content available to end users, which is definitely not the case in streaming media.

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