Volicon CTO Gary Learner for InBroadcast: Everying, Everywhere Broadcast Monitoring

Volicon CTO Gary Learner for InBroadcast: Everything, Everywhere Broadcast Monitoring

Earlier this month, Volicon CTO Gary Learner wrote an editorial for InBroadcast in which he talks about establishing cost-effective, comprehensive monitoring across linear and anytime, anywhere' services.

Everything, Everywhere Broadcast Monitoring

By Gary Learner, Chief Technology Officer, Volicon

Every day, a growing number of consumers use their smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices to access and view Internet-delivered content. As demand for anywhere, anytime' access to content continues to rise, broadcasters are joining the many other services and platforms that offer streaming media.

Competitive Edge

By extending their services to include Internet delivery of content, broadcasters can leverage and monetise their high-value professionally produced content more broadly, not only reaching a broader audience, but also increasing brand awareness and loyalty. With so many players in the field of over-the-top (OTT) media streaming, however, broadcasters are finding that their competitive edge depends on the quality of the content and service they provide. Consumers access OTT content from numerous sources and watch it on a multitude of devices. If they consider the content or viewing experience on any one of these services or devices to be less-than-desirable, they have many other options from which to choose. Rather than complain about the service, as they might with traditional TV broadcasts, OTT consumers are likely to move on to another source of content. Within this unforgiving environment, proactive monitoring is the best way Volicon Observer OTT - monitor across the distribution pipeline for broadcasters to guarantee the integrity of their streaming services, and ensure a consistent experience for the consumer, as well as the service quality promised to advertisers.

Quality Monitoring

To address broadcasters' need for convenient and cost-effective OTT service-quality monitoring, Volicon developed Observer OTT. This award- winning OTT service monitoring solution reflects Volicon's experience in engineering the advanced broadcast monitoring and logging systems that today support numerous broadcast operations, from single stations to large station groups, around the world in maintaining the integrity and compliance of their channel offerings. As broadcasters extend their offerings into the OTT realm, the innovative Observer OTT solution simplifies the task of ensuring a consistent experience across all streaming platforms and devices. Multiple channels require a quality service Observer OTT is a straightforward and highly scalable solution that allows the broadcaster to capture all content - in all renditions - over all IP delivery networks to smartphones, tablets, and computers. With this record of its OTT services, the broadcaster can verify streams' integrity, confirm compliance with the FCC's closed-captioning and loudness regulations, and validate the apps used by consumers to access content.

Troubleshooting

Giving broadcasters much greater visibility into OTT service delivery, Observer OTT supports agile identification and troubleshooting of issues that threaten quality of service and quality of experience for the consumer. The Volicon system eliminates the need to check services on the broad array of viewing devices in use today, automating OTT service monitoring processes and making them an economical part of broadcasters' larger monitoring workflows. Users manage OTT monitoring through an intuitive browser-based interface that features a customizable multiview function. Through this single interface, and using just one visual display, Observer OTT users can monitor the entire OTT pipeline for any given service.

Content Integrity

Because the external networks and devices that support content delivery and viewing can compromise quality of service, Volicon designed Observer OTT to enable broadcasters to compare the streams that leave their facilities, sent to an online service provider for distribution, with the streams received via user devices. Although content delivery networks (CDNs) typically monitor the feeds and speeds offered across geographies, broadcasters can employ Observer OTT to make sure that audio, video, captioning and other metadata, as well as timing (lip sync) are preserved. When the broadcaster is unable to access and capture the direct feed from the CDN, as is often the case for content distributed across different geographic areas, Observer OTT supports a simple strategy for confirming the integrity of content being consumed. Ingesting content via an array of mobile devices, the solution offers a window into the consumer's experience of streamed content. Complementary data about these streams helps to speed remote troubleshooting when necessary.

Service Solution

In today's media marketplace, consumption of Internet-delivered content has become mainstream, and broadcasters are moving to take advantage of the valuable new opportunities yielded by this delivery model. As a seamless and highly automated part of the larger monitoring workflow, Volicon's Observer technology serves as an always-on solution for logging and monitoring the complete lineup of offerings, across all outlets and platforms. Supplying monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities vital to delivery of high-quality services, Observer OTT eliminates barriers to effective and affordable provision of the anywhere, anytime content that consumers demand.

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LINK:	http://www.volicon.com/company/news-events/2015-press-releases/580-201...
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