How to Deliver Streaming Analytics Your Clients Want

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

Watch the complete presentation from Streaming Media East, VES203. Accessing Real-Time Metrics for Live Streams at Scale, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Robert Reinhardt: We do live event productions. And, typically, whenever I'm showing up for a live event or planning out that event with an organization, the first thing they're gonna wanna know is the number of viewers, right? So, that's a pretty simple metric to gather and that's usually gonna be concurrent number of viewers. They will, likely, wanna know the location of those viewers, as well. Where were they?

Since I do a lot of streaming for the British Columbia government, the provincial government, they'd like... A lot of those ministry broadcasts are for internal government employees, and they'd even want it broken down within the province. Like, how many people from the north end of the province attended? Because largely webcasts are done so they don't have to pay the cost of travel, right? Use taxpayer money to travel? No, just hire a crew like me, it's gonna be a lot cheaper to live stream So knowing the location of those viewers...

And lastly, and again this is other information, but these again are stakeholders that I typically work with, they want to know something about the quality of experience, if I can give it to them. And that would largely be, like "What is there, like, a lot of buffering going on?"

Especially for a live stream that's not so great, because unless you have DVR added to that mix, you don't really get a do-over. People might just stop watching the stream and say, "Whatever, I'll wait for the VOD when it's available." And more importantly, I think, for me as I'm getting deeper into analytics, is understanding more of those switches and bitrate renditions, right? How many people were watching low resolutions, how many were watching high resolutions, middle resolutions, all those kinds of tiers of analytics.

Unfortunately I don't have an example of that last category, quality of experience, to show you in any kind of meaningful way, although some of the vendors I'm gonna talk about could show it for you. And of course...

The other thing they want is that they don't want to pay for it, right? They're like "Oh wait, we have to pay for these analytics? Forget about it, just give us your best guess, whatever, of those requirements what can you tell us?" Because they don't want to have to pay on top of anything else that I would be doing for them.