BARCELONA, Spain—The video intelligence solutions provider NPAW has announced that it will be releasing an updated version for App Analytics and showcasing the new features at IBC 2024. With the new NPAW App Analytics, users can view app crashes and errors on all their streaming apps.

“The new App Analytics has vast AI-driven capabilities for identifying app and website crashes and errors, sign-up errors, login failures and UI problems,” explained NPAW’s head of Video Business Unit, Till Sudworth who is spearheading App Analytics for the company. “It also learns about the client’s apps. So it's able to spot anomalies and provide resolutions much faster, making their video services much more resilient.”

The updated application performance monitoring solution includes key features such as:

• Highlight critical app errors and crashes
• Blends app diagnostics data with the video analytics data
• AI-powered comprehensive analysis
• Spot website slow load times and page freezes
• New dashboards detail ‘App Errors & Crashes’, Web Performance’, ‘Sign up & Login Errors’
• Easy integration with the NPAW V7 Plugin

It also addresses common use cases facing streaming providers that affect the Application Quality of Experience (QoE):

• Login/Sign-up QoE - diagnoses error rates and statistics for Signup, Login and TV Pair flows. Top errors and crashes preventing logins and signups.
• Web/App QoE - detects issues with app loading, page loading, average time to interaction and more.
• Api QoE - logs API / Backend anomalies for all pages/screens on the client apps.

Learn more at this year's IBC, September 13th -16th - RAI Amsterdam, Booth #G76 — Hall 5.

DENVER—Video streaming infrastructure provider Bitmovin has announced that the Graham Media Group has selected Bitmovin Playback to enhance its viewer experience. 

Since deploying Bitmovin Player, Graham Media Group said it had doubled its online viewer engagement time. The solution is being used in Graham’s  Houston, Detroit, Orlando, San Antonio, Jacksonville, and Roanoke markets.

The Bitmovin Player ensures video playback across a wide range of devices. Bitmovin Analytics provides real-time monitoring, optimizes playback performance, and enables data-driven decisions to improve content and advertising strategies.

Graham Media, which operates seven local TV stations and digital hubs, chose the solution, which includes the Bitmovin Player and Bitmovin Analytics, to free its developers from the time-consuming task of maintaining playback quality. This allows them to focus on innovative user experience features to boost engagement and deliver local journalism to their communities.

Kenny Elshoff, senior web engineer at Graham Media Group, explained that “The speed to get the player into our codebase and extensibility of the SDKs made this the best player for us for now and the future.” 

Graham Media Group also deployed Bitmovin Analytics alongside the Bitmovin Player for real-time monitoring and to help optimize playback health. 

Before Bitmovin, Graham Media Group did not have integrated playback analytics, so the team didn’t have detailed insights into the quality of streams. Bitmovin Analytics ensures each stream's reliability by analyzing real-time user session data and sharing it with the player. Bitmovin Analytics reports any playback issues so they can be fixed before they impact the viewer, the company said. 

“Bitmovin is a well-known player in the video streaming industry and our top choice for a technical partner as we seek to expand our audience reach by offering game-changing viewing experiences powered by high-quality streams that drive viewing engagement,” said Michael Newman, director of transformation at Graham Media Group, “We can't wait to see the positive impact that Bitmovin's solutions will continue to have on our operational efficiency and viewer satisfaction as we continue on our quest to deliver content that informs and celebrates local communities.”

“Graham Media Group is a trusted local voice, and we are deeply honored that Bitmovin’s solutions will help deliver content that helps nurture community spirit,” added Stefan Lederer, CEO and co-founder of Bitmovin “The combined power of the Bitmovin Player and Bitmovin Analytics meets Graham Media  Group’s need for flawless playback for its millions of viewers with real-time analytics that resolves any playback issues and always optimizes for the best streaming experience.

BARCELONA—Video business intelligence solution provider NPAW has announced that it will be providing analytics solutions to Sportradar, a global technology company that provides business-to-business solutions to the global sports betting industry. 

As a result of the agreement, Sportradar will utilize the NPAW Suite’s Video Analytics product to optimize its streaming service and will integrate the tool into the Sportradar OTT platform to provide NPAW's analytics functionalities to Sportradar's clients. 

"The high-growth sports streaming space requires advanced analytics solutions that can help deliver superior experiences and boost business revenues. And custom insights and tools play a key role here," said Ruben Senor-Megias, chief sales officer of NPAW. "With the NPAW Suite, Sportradar and its clients can tailor the state-of-the-art capabilities of the platform to their specific monitoring, organizational, and branding requirements to make the most of their data."

The companies explained that Sportradar will use the NPAW Suite’s extensive real-time monitoring capabilities to enhance the Sportradar OTT Service. NPAW’s analytics insights will help Sportradar improve its service’s perceived quality experience (QoE), to better understand its audience behavior and content preferences, troubleshoot errors faster and more effectively to deliver improved client care.    

Additionally, with the integration of the NPAW Suite’s capabilities into the white-label Sportradar OTT platform, Sportradar customers will have access to deeper insights into video consumption, user engagement, and QoE. 

BARCELONA—OneFootball, the world’s largest football media platform, has announced it has chosen video business intelligence leader NPAW as its advertising analytics provider to monitor and optimize its ad strategy and experience.

The football media platform is using the analytics capabilities of the NPAW Suite’s Ads module to track ad performance and consumption at the end-user level. 

Unlike demand-side analytics solutions, which only offer limited ad insertion and impression insights, NPAW Ads provides full visibility into user behavior and perceived playback quality — a critical advantage when designing a superior ad experience centered around the viewer, NPAW said. 

“The true value of NPAW’s advertising analytics starts where that of demand-side solutions stop,” assured Patrick Fischer, CBO of OneFootball. “By having a clear, in-depth picture of what happens before, during, and after ad playback, we can optimize our ad experience to increase both ad revenue and user satisfaction.

Using the NPAW data on how its users consume ads, OneFootball plans to fine-tune its ad strategy and delivery to maximize engagement and monetization, the companies said. 

In addition, the agreement will provide teams with one source for ad data and make cohesive, data-based decisions., the companies said.  

“We are thrilled to be working with such a big a name in the football media space as OneFootball,” said Till Sudworth, CMO of NPAW. “We look forward to helping the platform make the most of its ad inventory while continuing to deliver the first-class viewing experience it is known for.”

IBM Watson might have had the busiest summer of anyone apart from Ben Stokes and Spider-Man, providing bespoke information and technology services to both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open on an unprecedented scale. Since its doubles partnership with Wimbledon began in 1990, the company has collected a net amount of 62,814,711 data points, which are spun up into insights, highlights and analysis.

“Wimbledon described the championships as like putting on a fantastic wedding,” says Sam Seddon, Wimbledon client and program executive at IBM. “So you’ve got to manage and micromanage the detail to make it the most wonderful day and experience possible. But they’re inviting 500,000 guests, they’re streaming it to 20 million guests, they’re doing it for 13 days and they need 24/7 security.”

BREAKING INTO MEDIA

IBM Watson supplies the technology elements needed to ace this objective and to enable Wimbledon’s emerging media enterprise. “They’re starting to set up a completely integrated broadcast and digital capability,” explains Seddon, citing the increasingly disruptive role sport is playing in the media business. ”The FIFA Women’s World Cup, British Grand Prix, Tour de France—they’re all happening at the same time so there’s a huge amount of focus on getting eyeballs. So the way that they’re doing that is by essentially turning themselves into a media business and thinking and acting like a media business.” 

At the same time, social media organizations like Facebook and telco giants such as AT&T are branching  into sport broadcasting and streaming, hence Wimbledon’s attempts to smash into the broadcast arena. “What we help them with is all of the enablement layers that allow them to put on the show,” says Seddon. “To a large extent that starts with data—whether that’s photography as data or stats as data, or whether that’s video.” 

IBM Hybrid Cloud is used to disseminate that data to 200 territories around the world, distributed from IBM Watson’s on-premise Cloud to mobile phones, tablets and desktops; 49.5 million users visited the Wimbledon.com website in 2018 over the course of the two-week tournament. The site is home to digital experiences designed and built by IBM Watson, including live scores and the MyWimbledon guest experience program where members can personalize their web portal. Users can also vote on the content that’s available on the large-screen TV on Henman Hill. “So whether you’re a debenture holder, or whether you’re a hospitality user, or whether you’re a player or whether you’re a fan, you’ll all come into a single access point, Wimbledon.com,” says Seddon.

SAFETY NETS

Another major role the company plays is in security, having helped to prevent more than 200 million cyber threats during the 2018 championships. Seddon uses an example of a security event from March 2019 where QRadar identified 663 different IP addresses associated with the attack. “IBM Watson for Cyber Security is able to distill that down to just 18 IP addresses in this set of particular events, which were then deemed to be a coordinated attack.

“What that allows us to do is be a lot more focused in terms of how we’re going about analyzing and tracking the source of this and being able to then put further measures in place if needed to ensure that nothing comes through,” he continues. “Since we put this in we’re about 60 times quicker on being able to respond to cyber security events, which from Wimbledon’s point of view is something they’re really, really focused on because their whole business model is built on quality.”

AI ADVANTAGE

Perhaps the most advanced aspect of IBM Watson’s solution is its AI deployment, capable of generating a postmatch highlights package in just two minutes. During the 2018 tournament, the company analysed over 2,000 hours of video content to generate hundreds of these packages for the website and other broadcasters. “We want to create highlights packages faster than a global news organization, we want them to be high quality, we want them to be Wimbledon quality, and we want them to be exciting,” Seddon remarks. “So how do you define excitement?”

Seddon describes the three sources of data used to make this judgement: sound coming from the umpire’s chair, video of the players themselves and match data.

“By looking at those three things together we’re able to define per points, how exciting is it by: are the crowd really animated? Is it a key point in the match? Are the players gesticulating, are they excited and fist pumping?” Using these metrics, IBM Watson ranks every single point by excitement, and packages the highest scoring into highlights along with automated graphics.

The 2019 championships saw the introduction of two new AI components. The first is Watson Acoustics, a machine learning tool trained to listen for the sound of the tennis ball on the racket. “That helps us from a clipping point of view,” explains Seddon. “Once the ball hits the racket you know the point’s started, and from an editing point of view that allows us to be very tight on the clipping, which is important to Wimbledon because they have only a certain amount of rights footage themselves, because they give that out to the BBC and worldwide broadcast partners.

“The other thing that we’ve introduced is an integrity solution,” he continues. “At the end of a match the crowd will disperse, they’ll go and get a drink, top up on Pimms, whatever it is they need to do. And it doesn’t matter that we’ve got another great quarter final coming on straight after it, the crowd noise in the stadium will be very, very different in the first period of that match. So what this allows us to do is moderate that, ensure there’s complete fairness for the next people that are coming on the court, and that their highlights are as high quality as the match that’s playing out. So just because there’s not much crowd in there, it won’t have an impact on that.”

RALLYING THE DATA

IBM Watson captured approximately 4.5 million points of tennis data during the 2019 tournament. These are input by trained tennis players, whose knowledge of the game allows them to see ahead of the point. “If there are any issues around the grounds then what they can do is call through a radio comms panel, talk to the operators that are watching the game, say ‘I’ve got an issue with 592 on whatever court’—so set five, game nine, point two.' The operators can then replay said point and correct the system where necessary. 

“It’s also very valuable to the players,” adds Seddon. “They get a match report within 20 minutes of the match finishing, but they also get a video file with the match analytics embedded into that file. So they can then jump through that and look at all of their break points or their winners or whatever it may be. By the time they’ve got out the shower they’ve got access to it on a mobile phone or tablet.”

The press also make use of this data via IBM Watson’s bespoke reporting service, as Seddon explains: “We’ve got results back to 1877 and all of our statistical data back to 1990. We’ve got a screen called the ‘Did you know?’ screen in the digital teams room that’s on a rolling ‘we found a new thing’, just helping seed ideas for content and prompt ideas.”

SECOND SERVE

How much divergence is there between the solution deployed for Wimbledon and that of the U.S. Open? “They’re both different unique client requirements,” says Seddon. “Some of the digital convergence is new here, that’s very much a Wimbledon thing; the Acoustics and integrity solution are new here. But the core part obviously like scoring systems are common between the two environments—but Flushing Meadows is a very different beast altogether as a venue and as an organization. 

“It’s a year round process so we’re constantly innovating, so we actually have a slightly offset delivery program; it’s about 18 months,” continues Seddon. “We do a kind of random ideation session that if we could dream up how to fly to the moon what would we do? And then we’ll come out of that with some proof of concept we want to do, give ourselves time to test those, maybe develop some prototypes in the six-month window, and then we’ve got a nine-month window to get production ready for it,” he concludes.

Once requiring its own specialized networks, television is rapidly becoming just another cloud-based service being delivered by general-purpose IP networks, both wired and wireless. But streaming video, nonetheless, is still a big challenge for network operators. Sharing a network with other content and applications raises both traffic engineering and security challenges. Customers have high expectations from years of rock-solid cable TV service, so service assurance is critical. One of the key pieces in delivering customers the quality of experience (QoE) they expect is a new breed of network analytics.

In the coming five years, the networking industry will be moving from 4G LTE to 5G, the new wireless standard. Promising +10X download speeds, 5G will open up the world of mobile television. While this is getting a lot of attention in the television industry, one of the other significant shifts that will come with 5G is a move to a cloud-based architecture across both mobile and fixed networks based on virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN).

Virtualized, SDN networks have long been used in cloud data centers, but the technology is swiftly migrating to the wider area network and, with 5G, to both wired and wireless networks. One of the reasons this approach is being embraced is that SDN networks running on virtual platforms are cheaper to run, not simply because they use general purpose computing platforms instead of specialized networking hardware, but they also use the physical resources more efficiently.

This efficiency is the result of them being more dynamic. SDN makes IP networks far more flexible and scalable. They can re-allocate under-utilized hardware resources instantaneously to meet whatever needs arise. Thus, if Ninja invites Drake to play Fortnite with him, instantly bringing 500,000 new viewers to his video stream, the SDN controller can spin up the network processing resources to meet the sudden spike in demand.

A PATCHWORK JUNGLE

Dynamically re-assigning IP resources to meet sudden shifts and spikes starts with good analytics. However, the analytics traditionally used in data centers aren’t enough. The wide area network outside the data center is a jungle made up of a patchwork of telecom operators, ISPs, MSOs, long-haul carriers and content delivery networks (CDNs). Traffic between them traverses a continually shifting constellation of peering points. Video streams can come from anywhere, and demand from viewers can shift in the blink of an eye.

Making matters even more challenging, the traditional network analytics approaches aren’t sufficient. Wide area networks have depended for decades on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to understand what was going on in the network. But as its name suggests, SNMP isn’t up to the complexity and the real-time demands of today and tomorrow’s networks.

The other key analytics technology is deep packet inspection (DPI). Deployed in routers with the processing power to look inside each packet at line speed and identify the payload, DPI can be expensive. Thus, operators tend to deploy the technology to do spot checks at key points in the network. However, its biggest challenge is that the majority of video streams are now encrypted, so DPI has no way of identifying the payload.

MAP AND CATALOG

The good news is that there is a wealth of network data that can be used to bolster SNMP and DPI. The problem is that this data is currently collected in silos across multiple different systems—making it extremely arduous (or impossible) to use them for better planning and traffic engineering. Thankfully, recent big data techniques, such as streaming vector, column-store databases, are coming to the rescue.

Using only public available data of the same sort that Google collects, it is now possible to literally map out the entire internet and catalog the development, over time, of everything happening on it. For instance, it is possible to map IP flows from source to destination. If you know the destination, for instance, a Netflix cloud server at AWS, then you know what service your customer is accessing. With this technology, operators are able for the first time to understand what over-the-top applications are traversing their network and how they are impacting it.

With this holistic view of the entire network in real-time, operators can adjust their resources for dynamic service assurance. They can also work intelligently with partners upstream, such as content providers and cloud providers, as well as downstream, such as neighboring networks and CDNs, to adjust their own resources. Is peering point A acting as a bottleneck, while peering point B is under-utilized? Would a different cloud provider better serve a content provider, such as Netflix, in a newly served market?

As television moves into the cloud era of 5G, it is leaving the very predictable confines of its purpose-built cable networks to become part of the world wild web. While there are all kinds of good reasons to go this route, it also raises issues around network management and service assurance for increasingly demanding customers. Happily, network operators, content platforms, cloud providers and distributors have new tools to take the guesswork out of network planning and troubleshooting. These techniques are already being deployed in 90 percent of US cable operators. Along with SDN and network virtualization, which are coming with 5G, they will form part of the core technology of this exciting and challenging new world.

Kevin Macaluso is General Manager, for Nokia’s Deepfield group.

EMERYVILLE, CA.—How good is the experience viewers are having watching streaming mobile videos? Gracenote, a Nielsen company, aims to find.

Gracenote today announced its new Mobile Video Analytics Solution for MVPDs, mobile operators, streaming services and hardware. The product gives them a way to better understand how the performance of mobile apps is affecting the way users behave, their attitudes about the experience and how consumer engagement with an app stacks up against competitors, the company said.

“In a hotly-contested marketplace for subscribers, it is critical to understand the factors that drive engagement and retention,” said Mike Greenawald, senior vice president, connectivity at Gracenote.

The in-depth examination of user interaction and engagement with mobile apps includes key performance metrics, such as the name of the wireless/internet service provider and type of streaming content.

The Mobile Video Analytics Solution provides insights into the performance quality of mobile video services, which is the greatest contributor to a viewer’s experience and satisfaction.

It also collects analytics on engagement, which include how, when and where viewers watch, how long they watch and other factors like stickiness of content, payload, network access and speed.

With the Mobile Video Analytics Solution, the attitudes of mobile users also can be measured on pricing and why viewers choose to subscribe or drop subscriptions as well as their intention to switch to another service.

Insight on these metrics can be measured against the performance of competitors with their subscribers, allowing streaming services to make course corrections to remain competitive.

When engagement is low, the new solution offers support for passive video tests and survey responses to examine behavior and find out the reason for disengagement and churn.

With the new analytics solution, wireless service providers also have the ability to detect areas of network congestion, which can guide them on where to add capacity.

More information is available on the Gracenote website. 

STOCKHOLM—Broadcasters have another tool to add to their tool belt when it comes to analytics, as Ericsson has announced the launch of Integrated Video Insights. The toolkit helps media players aggregate and analyze data derived from users, video platforms, and networks. Integrated Video Insights is supported by end-to-end framework and is designed to meet the needs for big-data processing in all operational, commercial and customer care areas of a media business.

Integrated Video Insights is available as either a standalone system or as an expansion module for the Ericsson Expert Analytics suite. The system offers advanced customer experience management capabilities, including the delivery of actionable insights.

“With Integrated Video Insights, [media players] can anticipate future operational needs, respond quickly to real-time issues, implement advanced, proactive customer care flows, and ultimately make better business decisions,” said Jean-Philipe Poirault, head of consulting and systems integration at Ericsson.