Technology focus > Quality assurance Digital TV Europe May/June 2013 Quality rules The success of the iPad has helped change consumers’ expectations of what web video should be, but quality assurance costs money. Stuart Thomson reports. Uptake of TV Everywhere serv- ices and over-the-top subscription video offerings has been rapid. By comparison, the adoption of pay TV services – including, over the past 10-15 years, managed IPTV services – was a much slower and more manageable affair. Nevertheless, viewers are increasingly demanding that video delivered over the web should be the same or of higher quality than broadcast video. The challenge from the point of view of content and service providers is how to deliver a quality of experience comparable with managed networks, in an environment where returns – from subscriptions or adver- tising – are marginal or non-existent and where the complexity of delivery is greater. Unlike with managed networks, OTT and TV Everywhere video is delivered over the open web and mobile networks, and service providers rely on the ability of content delivery networks (CDNs) and third-party service providers (ISPs) to deliver it without buffering and loss of quality. They are also delivering to a very wide – and growing – variety of devices, with an ever-expanding range of operating sys- tems and players. The explosion in the use of second screens to view video has clearly galvanised the OTT market, according to Fabien Maisl, director of marketing at quality assurance specialist Witbe. “Things have been moving very quickly over the last 12 months. Before that video on the PC or tablet was seen as a nice feature but it was OK if it was best effort. Service providers were trying to do it right but people would accept some issues,” says Maisl. This year, however, maintaining a good level of service on such platforms is seen as an essential part of service providers’ businesses. “It’s a very serious subject for servce providers and content owners alike. They are putting in measures to make sure they can deliver good quality,” says Maisl. Witbe provides software-based ‘robots’ that sit on client devices and mimic the actions of subscribers by browsing menus and logging in to a video-on-demand portal, for example. Maisl says that the company is offering its products to telecom and cable operators and also has customers from the broadcast and content provider business that are delivering additional revenues – notably advertising – from these types of services. The popularity of tablets and other devices notwithstanding, business models for OTT and multiscreen have still to be worked out. According to Simen Frostad, CEO of quality assurance specialist Bridge Technologies, the lack of significant revenues accruing to multi- screen services plays an important role in determining how much service providers are willing to invest in quality assurance. “All the feedback we hear is that [service providers] are excited about it but don’t see any money in it,” says Frostad. “That influences how people monitor the services. You have advanced services using completely different technologies going over the public internet with multiple CDNs, WiFi and mobile players, and TCP-IP transmission. At the same time there is no money in it.” He says that continu- ous quality assessment is important in this environment, enabling content providers to be sure of what they are sending out before it dis- appears into the ‘black box’ of the CDN infra- structure prior to delivery to end users. Bridge provides an OTT engine that monitors the ori- gin server for the metadata and the ‘chunks’ of video that make up adaptive bit-rate streams, “so you know what’s going on before you hand over to the CDN”, he says. However, Frostad adds this does not give insight into how the video is playing back at the end of the chain. For this reason, he says, it is important for serv- ice providers to use monitoring robots “post- cloud” to validate what is happening in differ- ent regions and with different ISPs. “The ultimate goal would be to see how each individual device is coping with media access,” says Frostad. This can be done via in-app mon- itoring devices. However, monitoring all devices in all households is prohibitively costly, especially given the limited revenues coming from multiscreen deployments today. Increasing expectations While the fact that limited incremental rev- enue from OTT and multiscreen services clearly inhibits investment in quality assur- ance, it is also true that viewers’ expectations are increasing. Mikael Dahlgren, CEO of Agama Technologies, points out that with OTT services, much of users’ fury when things go wrong is vented via social networking sites including Twitter, as well as on consumer Visit us at www.digitaltveurope.net 16