NPAW’s Gary Hunsberger on Streaming Analytics, AI-Driven Insights, and Expansion Plans in the U.S.
In this interview with Streaming Media contributing editor Jan Ozer, Gary Hunsberger, general manager of U.S. operations at NPAW (Nice People At Work), outlines the company’s approach to end-to-end quality monitoring, actionable data, and monetization support. Hunsberger, who joined NPAW seven weeks before NAB 2025, shares how the company differentiates itself in a crowded analytics market, discusses future AI integration plans, and previews growth initiatives in the U.S. and Canada.
With a presence spanning small houses of worship to global media platforms, NPAW delivers streaming analytics from the network probe level through to the end-user session, all within a single, customizable interface. Hunsberger explains how the platform helps customers retain subscribers, optimize CDN usage, anticipate churn, and make sense of overwhelming amounts of quality-related data—all while laying the groundwork for a greater North American footprint.
Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation.
From Bitmovin to NPAW
Jan Ozer: I'm sitting in the Nice People at Work booth with Gary Hunsberger, who's going to talk about the products and services offered by NPAW. Thanks for joining me, Gary.
Gary Hunsberger: Nice to be here, Jan.
Jan Ozer: So, give us a few seconds on what you've been doing. Where'd you come from?
Gary Hunsberger: About seven weeks ago, I joined NPAW—formerly from Bitmovin—and I’m now the general manager for the U.S. and Canada.
Target customers and differentiation
Jan Ozer: We're in your booth at NAB. What’s the big message here? Who are the companies you're trying to reach, and how do you differentiate your products and services for those targets?
Gary Hunsberger: It’s any customer delivering streams to end users who wants to ensure a good customer experience. That could be anyone from small churches to the large organizations we all deal with.
Jan Ozer: Small churches? Is that really a market you serve?
Gary Hunsberger: We have customers that serve that market.
Jan Ozer: It's a crowded market with several solutions. What's different about NPAW?
Gary Hunsberger: What we’re doing from a network probe and network monitoring perspective—very early in the content lifecycle all the way out to the individual user session—is monitoring the stream throughout that entire process. Bringing that into a single window, or a single pane if you will, is something we’re doing that’s very unique.
Making data actionable
Jan Ozer: Maintaining quality is pretty complicated. There's the merger of QoS and QoE. Describe your solution; what happens if I have a problem? How do you solve it before I even know it’s there?
Gary Hunsberger: That’s really where it's at: making sure the data is there, but also that it's actionable. Your teams need to get to that data quickly, understand the root cause of what caused an alarm or what’s going on with a CDN, and be able to act quickly.
We allow you to tailor the events that get triggered in a very granular way to suit your organization’s needs—and make that an easy process. We support customers with training and modeling, and in dashboard setup. The dashboards are highly customizable, and it's important to have a simplified view when you need it. If you're a network operator who just needs a simple view, customization is key—and we do that.
Live event support and root cause resolution
Jan Ozer: If I’m a live event producer, what am I watching during the show from a quality perspective?
Gary Hunsberger: It starts with your internal network. Then it's the health of the CDN. When something goes wrong, how do you crack that open and figure out the root cause?
Issues usually show up on the player, and it's guilty until proven innocent. It's imperative that you can understand if it's a DRM license server that's not working correctly, or if you've got CDN caching issues. You must be able to quickly open that up and troubleshoot it.
Customer success stories and expansion strategy
Jan Ozer: What are your big plans for NPAW in the U.S.? I assume you're here to increase presence, revenue, and profitability.
Gary Hunsberger: It's an underserved market for us. We've got some very big names—lighthouse customers—but overall, it's pretty underserved. I'm looking forward to perhaps putting out a U.S. office in New York, being closer to our customers, supporting them better, understanding their unique needs in this market, and growing the business that way.
Filtering the noise
Jan Ozer: One of the biggest problems in this business is that there's almost too much information. You get so much data that you don't know what to do with it. What's NPAW’s solution?
Gary Hunsberger: That definitely happens. You can set a large number of filters and get a lot of errors. What we're doing is putting an AI intelligence agent across the entire workflow—that's going to help customers more quickly understand what's causing those errors. We call it Sentinel.
Sentinel will make recommendations and allow customers, through a process of elimination and more training, to get to the root causes more quickly.
Jan Ozer: Who does the training?
Gary Hunsberger: We take care of that. We're very strong in professional services—handholding customers, helping them set up dashboards. This is something that's very new to a lot of customers, so we'll be heavily involved in assisting them.
AI now and later
Jan Ozer: Where else are you seeing AI touch your products in the next 12 to 24 months?
Gary Hunsberger: This is a lot of work. I think we're just going to get really good at this for now—and then we'll see where it goes.
Helping customers monetise
Jan Ozer: We've been hearing “monetization” over and over. How does your product help customers monetise?
Gary Hunsberger: It's about retention. Churn is an ongoing challenge for many of our customers. That gets to the heart of making sure the end user is having a good experience with their subscription or with the stream they're watching.
We're enabling customers to use the data we're gathering to ensure that quality of experience is a good one. When it's not, we help customers understand why and allow them to be more proactive.
For example, I had a meeting here with our friends over at Cleeng. They're involved in subscription management. They can tell you how many customers churned last month—but they can’t tell you why.
When you couple a solution like Cleeng with what we gather, we can tell customers, “Everyone who churned last month was on Android.” That gives you actionable data. Let’s go take a look at our Android implementation and find out why that might be. Then we can be more proactive.
Jan Ozer: I want to prevent churn. How do you help me do that?
Gary Hunsberger: As you're monitoring and tracking these issues, you can anticipate future problems. If you know you've had an issue with a DRM license server, that allows you to get ahead of it.
Maybe you reach out to those remaining Android customers, give them a free month, or just let them know you're working on it. That proactive outreach can help keep them from churning.
Optimising multi-CDN delivery
Jan Ozer: What about multi-CDN? It's something we hear about a lot. How are you helping customers implement that?
Gary Hunsberger: That’s really important. It speaks to cost. We all know there's significant cost in distributing content.
Sometimes customers choose a CDN based on performance but don’t understand that there might be a more cost-effective CDN they could be using at any given time. Being able to monitor the performance of those CDNs—and switch actively, even mid-stream—is going to be a huge benefit.
Adoption rates and competitive differentiation
Jan Ozer: Looking at publishers in particular, how many of them currently have a QoS solution in place? Is it 100%? 50%?
Gary Hunsberger: What I’m seeing is that it’s about 100% in all cases. But when they take a look at the portfolio we’ve got and the holistic view we can give them, the lights go on.
Jan Ozer: What are the table-stakes features that differentiate you from other providers?
Gary Hunsberger: It’s that holistic view. There are a lot of siloed implementations out there. It's important to be able to share and view data across the entire workflow.
If you've got data in one silo and data in another, you can't share that. Organizations need to be able to share information amongst themselves.
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