Current Situation
A comprehensive monitoring system includes the following:
Encoder status, start/stop streaming, alarms, etc. It is critical to monitor for all possible issues like frame misalignment, syntax errors, over-compression, absence of markers and metadata, dropped packets, and compliance slips as these issues can negatively impact a positive viewer experience.
A monitoring system should be able to monitor end-to-end workflow, raise alarms, report streaming status, and notify issues that occur anywhere in the end-to-end system.
Goals and Objectives
Future OTT Monitoring Fixes:
Simulating last mile bandwidth variations
Convergence of protocols
Limiting the number of manifests and reducing error rates while switching from one manifest to another
Future Advances in Cloud-based Monitoring of OTT Content
Converging of streaming protocols, a widely adapted industry standard; MPEG-DASH for instance
A protocol based on segmented delivery with near zero latency
Advances in video compression, partly promised by H265 and efficient utilization of available bandwidth for best QoS
Technology Deployed
A comprehensive QC tool needs to be used for a wide range of baseband quality checks, such as video signal levels, color bleeding, blotches, blur, defective pixels, black frames, color bars, RGB color gamut, mosquito noise, audio levels, audio noise, and a host of other such artifacts. A good QC tool must ensure that these are detected with high level of accuracy and reliability and minimal false positives. When the content is compressed, several compression artifacts such as blockiness, pixelation, Moire pattern, and ringing artifacts can get introduced in the lossy compressed video. A good QC tool needs to ensure that the transcoded content is free from these artifacts.
File Integrity and Standards Compliance Checks
Once the content is ready for distribution, OTT monitoring technology needs to address multi-segment ABR transcoding, streaming and VOD delivery process for all profiles and clients. QoS, throughput, latency, reliability and QoE are all key metrics to be monitored.
Use Case Summary
QoS and QoE monitoring use cases include baseband and compressed content checks, redundancy and CDN changeover, latency and buffering checks, content and ad replacement checks, scaling adjustment and performance checks, and final delivery and viewing data analytics.