Technology focus > Quality assurance Digital TV Europe September/October 2012 Quality control in an OTT world As premium OTT services become more widespread, Quality assurance is coming to the fore. Anna Tobin reports. providers are increasingly Service investing in Quality of Service (QoS) technology for over-the-top TV, as they start to appreciate that poor service will not be tolerated on any screen. Unsatisfactory sound and picture quality even on a tiny mobile device is now seen to impact on churn. Unmanaged network With so much choice available, it’s easy for consumers to look elsewhere if their service doesn’t measure up. “Research shows that with so much choice, the decision of providers is based on quality,” says Paul Casinelli, prod- uct marketing manager at IneoQuest. “In fact, OTT consumers who experience an issue with their video services are more likely to leave providers or switch to a competing serv- ice than an IPTV or cable consumer is. This makes quality the determining factor for the success of the business; and, thus, a key requirement for service providers.” Maintaining a high QoS in the unmanaged internet, however, is problematic. In the good old days of ‘traditional’ IPTV and cable deliv- ery, content providers knew exactly where on their networks architecture all their receiving devices were, what type they were and how many there were. This made pinpointing faults, predicting audience figures and band- width needs relatively straightforward. OTT providers do not have total control over their delivery mediums. “Each time the content switches and travels across another network link, new variables can be introduced that may affect the delivery of the packets,” says Tyler DeNeui, sales engineer at quality assurance specialist Sencore. “This is why, with OTT, it becomes very important to mon- itor that each video packet is ‘healthy’ and available to all users, with the provider having sufficient bandwidth to serve each stream.” What has changed is the type and complex- ity of the network topologies over which serv- ices need to be delivered, says John Maguire, director of product strategy, TV technology at quality assurance specialist S3 Group. “There has been a migration from managed delivery networks to unmanaged delivery networks; from service provider mandated receiver hard- ware to customer-procured hardware; from standalone receiver devices in the home to cooperative devices in the multiscreen home, which now interact to share content and device control; and, an explosion in the diver- sity of sources of content being consumed by individual users who can now access a range of different content with different availability attributes, e.g. on-demand, broadcast, peer-to- peer etc.,” he says. OTT video streams are transferred via HTTP/TCP. Classical monitoring tools focus- ing on packet loss and jitter are not suitable and this makes an end-to-end approach to quality control impossible, says Fabien Maisl, director of marketing at Witbe. “No party – service provider, content provider, CDN provider – can properly assess and manage the quality delivered end-to-end,” says Maisl. “Quality monitoring solutions designed specifically for OTT services are user-centric – as opposed to network-centric legacy monitor- ing tools. They measure the quality actually delivered to the end users’ devices to identify the points of failure in the service delivery chain – headend, transport network and Visit us at www.digitaltveurope.net 20