Category: Measurement/QoE

As the streaming tech stack has grown in complexity, ensuring a high-quality viewing experience has become increasingly challenging. Part of that is the nature of a distributed architecture frequently assembled from third party services and technologies as well as just more moving parts. But part of it is also a lack of well-established standards which meet the specific needs of streaming content providers. The combination of these two issues results in operational “blind spots” when tracing issues through the workflow. Because of the critical importance of data within streaming operations, any blind spots can significantly increase the Mean Time to Diagnose (MTTD) and, more importantly, the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). When these operational streaming metrics go up, QoE and viewer satisfaction goes down often resulting in loss of revenue and/or increased churn. There is a need then, for a standardized approach to trace data across the different vendors in the streaming video technology stack with an obvious starting point: CDNs.