Technology focus > Quality assurance and data analytics Digital TV Europe April/May 2015 Good behaviour Applying user behaviour analytics to ensure quality of delivery and shape service offerings has been a hot topic in the quality assurance world for some time. But can big data be too much data? Stuart Thomson reports. Quality assurance has until relatively recently been a second-ranked priority for many service providers, who have relied on customer complaints to deal with problems as they occur or, in the case of OTT service providers, have delivered best effort services without a guarantee of quality. However, the use of IP delivery now means that service providers have the opportunity to delve in much greater depth into patterns of user behaviour and the responses of users to different experiences on different platforms. The adoption of OTT or semi-managed delivery platforms by service providers means that there is an ever greater array of variable factors that could determine 22 how well video is delivered over different networks to different platforms. Client monitoring Quality assurance specialist Agama has been a strong supporter of the client monitoring approach to quality assurance. According to CEO Mikael Dahlgren, client device monitoring emerged as particularly important for OTT providers that relied on multiple CDNs to deliver their content to end users. “The market has begun to understand how to create value from data but not for the whole chain,” says Dahlgren. “The quality of the data is one thing but drawing the right conclusions is another.” For Dahlgren, the use of data to proactively prevent problems emerging, rather than the reactive use of data to analyse behaviour after the fact, promises the greatest benefit to service providers. “Proactive work holds out the larger possibility of real gains. If you can reduce trouble you will get more satisfied customers. If you can eliminate the problem before the customer calls in, it is better,” he says. Dahlgren says that correlating user behaviour with quality metrics is a useful approach, giving operators data that can be used at senior management level to take informed decisions. More and more operators, he says, are giving executives at senior level direct responsibility for customer relations management, bringing quality to Visit us at www.digitaltveurope.net