 | Issue: | Africa and the Middle East 2014 |
| Article no.: | 4 | |
| Topic: | OTT media monitoring and recording in the Cloud | |
| Author: | Hiren Hindocha | |
| Title: | President | |
| Organisation: | Digital Nirvana | |
| PDF size: | 227KB |
About author
Hiren Hindocha, CEO, Digital Nirvana, Inc.
Hiren Hindocha brings an extensive background in management and IT to Digital Nirvana, including more than twelve years of experience in a variety of technology based roles. Prior to co-founding the company, Mr. Hindocha served as: Vice President of E-Commerce at Walt Disney Internet Group, Director of Engineering at Infoseek, and was a consultant for Cap Gemini, Ernst and Young.
He is currently on the Board of Directors for Abode Services, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco that assists homeless families and individuals in finding permanent housing.
Mr. Hindocha holds a MS in Computer Science from Cleveland State University, and a BE in Electrical Engineering from JNT University.
Article abstract
Many broadcasters currently monitor and record streamed content using a labor-intensive, manual approach. It’s common to have operators with iPads or other handheld devices monitoring and recording live streams. This is highly inefficient.
An automated, scalable, cloud-based solution, like our AnyStream IQ system, can reliably monitor and record the streamed programming of broadcasters, tracking any loss of video, audio, or closed captions, and conveniently display all alerts related to a channel in one place.
The broadcaster should also be prepared to scale up on a moment’s notice. You don’t want your site to go down when you are streaming a popular event and a video or a tweet goes viral. A cloud-based solution can scale up or down easily to handle live events.
Full Article
As live streams grow in popularity, and OTT content becomes a bigger revenue driver for broadcasters, reliable live stream monitoring and recording becomes increasingly important. Today, live stream programming coincides with every major broadcast. While networks are equipped with the necessary tools to monitor and record traditional broadcasts, they’re currently lacking the same for streamed media.
Even though experts predict a triple digit increase in ad growth for online media through 2017, there hasn’t been anything available that enables content distributors to monitor their “online channels.”
Many broadcasters currently monitor and record streamed content using a labor-intensive, manual approach. It’s common to have operators with iPads or other handheld devices monitoring and recording live streams. This is highly inefficient.
To move on to the next step in online monitoring, broadcasters need to look at dependable, easy-to-use cloud-based solutions for recording, logging and monitoring OTT content. The time has come to streamline this process, removing the possibility of human error from something so critical to a station’s bottom-line.
An automated, scalable, cloud-based solution, like our AnyStream IQ system, can reliably monitor and record the streamed programming of broadcasters, tracking any loss of video, audio, or closed captions, and conveniently display all alerts related to a channel in one place. With new web captioning requirements requiring broadcasters to provide proof of web captioning for hearing impaired viewers, a solution that can extract and display captions is of great value.
Also, broadcasters often insert ads into programming that is streamed to desktops and mobile devices. These ads are often different from ads running during the traditional broadcast. TV stations must be able to log, record and monitor their streaming content to provide a ‘proof of airing’ to advertising clients. And these OTT streams have to be in compliance with regulatory bodies.
The broadcaster should also be prepared to scale up on a moment’s notice. You don’t want your site to go down when you are streaming a popular event and a video or a tweet goes viral. A cloud-based solution can scale up or down easily to handle live events.
Given all of these recent developments in online media requirements, we’ve seen a rising demand for our cloud-based stream monitoring and recording solution. Requests come from content owners and distributors, as well as large broadcast networks and station groups. Everyone is kicking the tires as the consumption of streamed media increases at a rapid pace, and I suspect it has caught many broadcasters off guard. While we expected a strong reaction to our cloud-based monitoring and recording solution from local stations, we were more surprised by the response from content distributors that stream video online. Due to the enthusiastic global response, we recently partnered with EMEA Gateway for worldwide sales and marketing support. EMEA Gateway has over 25 years of experience selling hardware and software products in the broadcast industry throughout the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.
A cloud-based monitoring solution plays an important role in the live stream workflow. Benefits of a cloud-based solution include a subscription-based pricing model that spreads monitoring costs throughout the year and the elimination of expensive equipment and maintenance fees.
With a cloud-based system, there is no hardware or software to install. A browser-based interface is used to record, monitor and search FLV, HDS and HLS formatted streams.
But, setting up OTT monitoring and recording presents technical and organizational challenges for broadcasters. For OTT services, a team must understand both web technologies and streaming. Often broadcasters have two departments to deal with this – one is the digital broadcasting side that deals with the web and streaming technologies and the other is the traditional broadcasting team.
In the context of a local television stations whose main content is news, the challenges are in determining how video content is consumed on Internet. Broadcasters need to segment the news into smaller stories and publish them individually with captions and text such that they can be discovered using search engines as well as on the publisher’s website. While the traditional broadcast TV station is constrained by the half hour new show format, there is no such constraint for online streaming.
What’s most important is to understand the viewer and deliver content that keeps them engaged. It’s key to have a good search engine and a well designed site or mobile app that allows the user to easily find content most appealing to them.
In the context of networks and entertainment channels, broadcasters must be prepared for binge watching. This makes maintaining an easily searchable and vast archive extremely important.
And for a good user experience, it’s necessary to generate multiple bit rates of content as well as different formats to cater to the widest possible audience. This includes Android, IOS and Windows devices such as phones, tablets, desktops and streaming devices like Roku and Amazon, FireTV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast and other media players, and support HLS, HDS, flash RTMP, and Silverlight. It is best to have this complexity out of the broadcaster’s workflow and in the cloud where it is best optimized by a competent third party. There are many transcoding providers in the cloud, and as such, broadcasters have a choice. A good transcoding solution is one in which the user experience is good no matter what device they come in on or what bandwidth they have.
Technology will continue to evolve and better compression technologies will be invented and bandwidth will increase, but what will determine their adoption will be what the industry leaders adopt. As an example, MPEG – Dash did not see mainstream adoption until it was accepted by Apple and Google.
Streaming and broadband speed feed off of each other. The faster the broadband speed, the more there is streaming consumption. And as streaming consumption increases, so does the demand for faster broadband. While users with poor Internet connection or bandwidth may consume linear content, broadcasters should be prepared to cater to the needs of the users with a strong broadband connection. This is the fastest growing sector of broadband usage.
As always, technology will continue to evolve and broadcasters and content owners should strive to ride the wave of the technological change, or else risk getting swept away by it.
