Prioritizing OTT Monitoring
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Learn more about OTT monitoring at Streaming Media East Connect 2021.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: What is the most efficient and effective way to monitor all your OTT platforms? How do you choose what's most important? What's less important? And how do you prioritize?
Peter Wharton: Imagine if you're a broadcaster in the past. You monitored your transmitter. He had one thing to monitor. It wasn't exactly the hardest thing in the world. And then you started having cable and satellite distribution. You had to monitor those things too. And then you had your own website. Now you've got OTT platforms, you've got virtual MPDs, you've got all this and that. You've got a zillion ways that your content is getting out there. And you need to make sure that your content throughout this entire distribution network maintains the quality that you start with, that your customers expect. And so you also now recognize that the content at some of these more distant nodes and distribution methods doesn't have as many viewers and therefore not the same value as the content where you originated from. right where it starts.
So you have to figure out how to scale your monitoring to make it cost-effective across the entire distribution chain, without ignoring those endpoints. And I think that's one of the key things here: It needs to be able to scale across a very large system. It needs to scale on demand, because you have large events and you have small events. And then you also need to have the cost match the value of the content at each one of those places. And I think that those are the metrics that are really driving what our customers are looking for today.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmusen: So, under the status quo, or the way things have been done, you still need to buy licenses. You still need to buy hardware. That's a huge investment. Can you talk a little bit about that and then we'll lead into talking about some alternatives?
Peter Wharton: Well, so, licenses and hardware are the old-school way of doing things in some ways, because you bought equipment and you put it up there and you basically bought the license because you bought the hardware and we're moving, obviously, to a software model or you're running services, and ideally running those services where you need to run them. And then the next thing is, you want those services to scale so that you're able to actually run different levels of services at different monitoring points to match the value of that content. And then you also want a license model that is consumption-based, an OpEx space, so you can actually pay for just what you're consuming. We've done something called adaptive monitoring where you can sit there and you can monitor all those nodes in your network, but you can have a very lightweight monitoring at those more distant nodes, but when a problem occurs or when you want to look at something in more detail, you can ramp that up to the same full-level monitoring you might put into source.
So it gives you the ability to actually see everything with the value you want at the same time, never sacrificing the ability to actually do a deep dive and really make sure you're perfect at the very edge.
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TAG Video Systems' Peter Wharton and Streaming Media's Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen discuss how OTA broadcasters should be following OTT providers to the cloud with "their origin and everything else they're doing" as soon as possible--if they're not among those already moving in that direction--in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2021.
12 May 2021
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