Beyond Bytes
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How metrics that matter will revolutionize your video strategy
Real-Time Entertainment traffic dominates today’s communication networks, and is projected to account for 60% of total traffic by year’s end. Accordingly, Internet providers worldwide must formulate strategies that account for the international expansion of services like Netflix, Spotify, and BBC’s iPlayer, but meaningful information is often lacking. If you have asked questions like:
- - How many minutes of online video did my subscribers watch last week?
- - Which devices are driving over-the-top consumption on my network?
- - How does video quality of experience vary throughout my network?
- - Are over-the-top providers delivering better quality than on-deck services?
…then this webinar might prove invaluable.
Join telecoms.com and Sandvine for this free webinar as we address the following:
- - Find out why service providers are struggling to understand the implications of the real-time entertainment revolution
- - Discover how monitoring the right metrics can be a game-changer
- - Become the “go-to” insight champion of your organization by owning unique and powerful information
- - Learn about Sandvine’s Network Analytics, the business intelligence product that’s driving better decision-making for Internet operators around the world (and maybe for your competitors)
- - Be introduced to Sandvine’s new Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard that provides ISPs with understandable metrics that quantify the subscriber’s quality of video experience and measure video adoption
Webinar speakers:
Lee Brooks, Product Marketing Manager at Sandvine and Mike Hibberd, Editorial Director, Telecoms.com.
Tags; Archive, IP&TV, Mobile Video, Sandvine, telecoms.com, videoQ&A
sorry i mean user QoE
Similarly, the QoE would be associated with the cloud storage provider. Regardless of origin, the traffic is still video, and we would still create QoE measurements.
will metrics be able to analyze user behavior based on an APP running from a mobile wireless device, say i am streaming an HD video from a cloud storage from an third party app running on iPhone
Hi there, and thanks for the inquiry. Metrics will be linked to the “video provider”, regardless of whether or not the video is viewed via an app or from direct navigation to a web page. If a user was relying on an app to a cloud storage system, then that storage system would be the provider (indeed, this is what I have observed in the Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard’s initial deployments).
what is Policy for video? Does video need a particular Policy? or is it jthat Policy would treat video in a simialr way it treats the BB traffic and services ?
Hi Simon – a good question. The actual policy deployed will depend upon the desired use case. A simple example would be optimization of a caching deployment: in this case, the policy involves correctly identifying requests for video traffic so that they can be intelligently redirected to a local cache (the key part here is to only redirect video – some ‘solutions’ on the market just perform port redirects or redirect all HTTP, which is horribly inefficient and can have severe implications for subscriber quality).
A more complex example would be adaptive rate limiting, whereby the technical details of the video are parsed and understood, and a shaper enforces a video bitrate just above what is required to prevent buffer exhaustion. This policy addresses the “bail-out” inefficiencies that occur when a video is buffered to, say, 5 minutes, and the user bails out after 2 minutes.
Actually, I meant how do you capture the information displayed in the real-time entertainment dashboard?
Gotcha – one of Sandvine’s platforms is the Policy Traffic Switch, which PTS implements policy decision and enforcement per packet, flow, protocol and subscriber, and collects
associated measurements. It is deployed in-line with the IP traffic flow, on the data plane, within the service provider network, behind the edge aggregation device. Another platform is the Service Delivery Engine, which serves as the policy decision interface to all external solutions and systems, handles subscriber entitlement changes, and provides policy control across varied access network technologies and policy enforcement points.
The Real-Time Entertainment Dashboard relies on data generated and measurements made by both of these platforms.
How are you able to measure video stalls?
Thanks for the question! The Policy Traffic Switch has extensive measurement capabilities and has complete insight into video header information. By knowing the info like container, codec, and bitrate, performing measurements on the actual data flow, and comparing to what the stream actually needs, we can differentiate between a video stall and a natural pause due to bursty buffering.
Is there a way to get a copy of these slides? Do you have a white paper that covers this in detail? GREAT INFORMATION!
Thanks for your interest! I know the webinar will continue to be hosted for a while, but if anyone wants copies of my portion then please e-mail me directly at lbrooks@sandvine.com
How are you measuring/gathering this information?
Hi Roy – Thanks for your question, I should’ve been more clear in my slides. Most of the stats I cited came from our Global Internet Phenomena studies (can be found here: http://www.sandvine.com/news/global_broadband_trends.asp ).
You are showing network traffic in the main BACKBONE of the Internet, correct? I thought that by Caching the most popular content on SERVERS near the point of delivery (the “edge”) that the most popular videos will only travel over the BACKBONE a few times, and then be “cloned” on the EDGE SERVERS. How does that impact your traffic data? Or does it? Gerry Kaufhold with In-Stat
Thanks for the question Gerry – this is one I hear often so I really need to do a better job addressing it in advance! In deployments where our equipment is installed very near the subscriber/service edge, we will see all of the video traffic. But you are right that deployments “above” the CDN or cache will miss some video. For the stats I’ve cited, I relied on networks where everything was visible.
Why is it important to have a single quality score – isn’t it enough to be able to view all the individual factors?
Another good question! Ultimately, it’s important to have both: a summary score is easily understood and communicated, can spur immediate action, and can highlight issues (it’s very powerful to know “at a glance” what the subscriber experience is); the more granular details that contribute to the score can help to diagnose network issues and understand the root causes of quality degradation.
Without the granular measurements and stats behind-the-scenes, the high-level score isn’t possible, but it isn’t always necessary to get into that level of detail when someone is just performing a general health check. We’ve all probably made the mistake of presenting too much detail in a presentation and getting pulled into long tangential conversations, where a nice, concise “everything’s great!” would have been more appropriate.
Do you know of any providers who have successfully launched plans based on minutes of usage for video?”
Thanks for the question – we have seen several providers exploring these models and launching products. For instance, in Canada, Bell has seen a great deal of success in changing the way in which they bill their mobile video value-added service. Early in 2011, Bell transitioned away from billing by the byte and began to bill by hours of video watched. This new pricing model charges $5 a month for 10 hours of mobile video access and, since making the change, the service has exploded in popularity, with over 300,000 or 5% of post-paid customers subscribing to the service.
Also (sorry, I meant to post this earlier but dived right into the questions): What is the name of the newest Network Analytics dashboard? Tweet your answers to @sandvine – the first two correct respondents will receive a fun prize pack!