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so yes , our customers have a renewed interest in services that can be operated remotely either on prem , virtualised in a data centre or in the public cloud . SSIMWAVE : Lockdowns accelerated trends that already were underway . D2C services were moving services to the cloud to take advantage of scalability , flexibility , the ease with which trials can be conducted and the ability from a financial point of view to allocate resources more efficiently . Telestream : The majority of modern workflows were able to use existing Telestream test and monitoring solutions , fully remotely to meet objectives . Older workflows in some cases accelerated upgrades to more efficiently support remote work . Both unexpected urgent projects due to Covid , and future projects increasingly use Telestream software-based products , virtual and cloud-based solutions . Torque : The portions of the broadcast ecosystem that have been migrating to cloud over the past few years are still migrating to cloud . If anything , pretty much everything has slowed down during the lockdown . There are projects that have been delayed due to the lockdowns . It is common to see projects that were scheduled for this year to be rescheduled to about six to nine months into the future .
How do Service Providers ensure QoE across a range of networks and devices ? Interra : Today ’ s service providers are creating and transcoding large volumes of content for different target devices . Ensuring QoE in today ’ s OTT world requires a smart , end-toend QC and monitoring strategy . The majority of quality issues occur as a result of improper video encoding during content preparation . Therefore , you need to have a QC system early on , in the content preparation stage , that performs in-depth analysis and quality checks to detect any problems that would cause issues with ABR streaming . For IP-based workflows , the incoming streams should be monitored at
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ingest and post video-processing stages for QoE affecting problems in the transport stream , such as network jitter , macroblocking , closed captions , and audio loudness . On the delivery side in the ABR workflow , content must be proactively monitored at the post-origin server for content availability , HTTP related checks , playlist validation , and QoE affecting checks such as macroblocking and freeze frames . Having a comprehensive monitoring system that alerts you when QoE-affecting errors are detected and provides visibility into the status of streams at various stages in the workflow can help expedite troubleshooting and problem resolution , ensuring a better quality of service and experience . Mediaproxy : Having control over scaling and the tooling is key to be able to deliver the highest QoE to customers . Automation and centralisation increasingly play more important roles in this context . Promptlink : By aggressively monitoring and finding new ways to address network issues , operators are having to do more analytics and rely on tools vs . having resources deployed to the field en masse . An error-free network = high QoE for users . Qligent : This is only possible through a tremendous amount of data gathering and analytics . We ’ re learning that you can never gather enough data , and a constant flow of data is needed to best manage the quality of experience . Consider the aggregation points on your network . For example , there are always two mirror facilities that act as the origination source of your content . That is where the greatest control exists . There is more integration with third-party networks and cloud services further out in the network , which leads to less control over network resiliency . At this point it becomes more important to truly understand the impact of your deliverable at the consumer level . Without that control , it ’ s hard to diagnose from the inside out . When monitoring from the outside in - starting at the consumer and |
working backwards – trouble spots on the network are instantly highlighted . The ability to truly understand if you are serving consumers properly starts at the edge and works backwards . R & S : We are focused on ensuring the broadcaster can monitor the quality of signal throughout their broadcast workflows right to the delivery from the CDN . SSIMWAVE : To be honest , this is still a ‘ Wild West ’. A survey we did over the summer showed great variability in how providers measure QoE . It almost seems like every provider has their own thermometer with their own scale for measuring video quality . At the same time , customers are realising that they can no longer afford to let video quality be a by-product of rate control mechanisms . The most innovative are thinking of video quality as an end goal , not an afterthought , and are building workflows to deliver that . One of the things that has become clear is that older metrics like PSNR [ Peak signal-to-noise ratio ], which were sufficient in the past , can ’ t keep up with streaming , HDR and other advances . We ’ ve seen content with ‘ banding ’ impairments get high video quality scores , even though it was annoying to watch . As technology changes , the industry needs new tools that can help it keep viewers satisfied . Telestream : Service providers deploy Video Quality Monitoring products from Telestream to monitor QoE end-to-end across the delivery network . This includes on-premise , virtual and cloud-based monitoring services . Telestream provides a single pain-of-glass operational view across the entire network , from ingest , after encoder and through the CDN edge , enabling operations to find and fix faults fast . In addition , Telestream provides visibility and correlation with consumer player analytics , so operators see a single real-time QoE and customer impact analytics . Torque : The tools and techniques have not really changed over the last few years . Firstly , to ‘ ensure ’ QoE you would need some way to measure it now before deciding if it is gets better or worse . So , since that ‘ Quality of Experience ’ is intrinsically a subjective impression in the eye of the beholder , the only scientific way to “ measure ” it would be to take a survey of actual viewers . Not practical . Making objective , technical measurements which hopefully correlate to QoE is the only solution . As the transmission characteristics , network protocols and network topologies are vastly different between OTT and traditional services ( for example , IPTV , DTH , Cable , etc ), the measurement tools needed will |