The Cost of Content Downtime

Abstract What happens when you deliver a poor streaming video experience? Your subscribers and viewers might abandon your service for a competitor’s. To prevent that, you need to do everything to provide the best possible quality of service. And that starts with ensuring content availability—your streams are available and ready even before your users log in. With Touchstream’s StreamCAM™ cloud-based solution, you can monitor every bit rate of every stream 24/7 to ensure your content is always available.

Introduction John is binge watching the latest season of his favourite show on his mobile phone. He’s connected via Wi-Fi on his home network. At first, the quality is amazing. But when his parents join him on the couch and start streaming on the television, John notices the quality degrading until, eventually, he gets an error the stream isn’t available anymore.

“Not again,” he mumbles.

He opens and closes the app a few times. Startup time is slow, it’s buffering constantly, and when he eventually connects, the quality is still bad. Finally, the error reappears. Frustrated, he turns his attention to a different OTT provider’s app that doesn’t seem to have the same problems and starts watching different content, silently wondering if it’s worth subscribing to content he can only watch occasionally.

So what happened with John? In a very common scenario, John’s available bandwidth diminished as more people jumped on the home network resulting in a degrading bitrate until his player requested an unavailable bitrate. Perhaps it was because of a bad CDN configuration or a corrupt file. Whatever reason, the bitrate wasn’t there, and John received an error instead of his favorite content.

Online video viewers, like John, have little tolerance for a poor experience. Whether it’s too many buffering events, a slow startup time, or even broken bitrates causing playback errors, viewers are apt to abandon OTT services when the quality of experience is less what they might find with broadcast television. Imagine what a thousand, or ten thousand Johns means to the bottom line of an OTT service provider.

What Causes Viewer Abandonment? There are a variety of causes of viewer abandonment including slow start time, too much rebuffering, unavailable content streams and more. Regardless of the cause one thing is for certain: viewers have little appetite for poor quality of service.

We offer some stats on online video abandonment:

• When video quality is poor the abandonment rate jumps to 33%1. • Only 8.2% of viewers return to watch a video after quality issues2. • 50% of viewers abandon a video with a five second startup delay3. • On average, OTT services see a 19% churn rate4. • Approximately 35% of viewers churn from OTT services because of quality issues5.

What is Quality of Service (QoS)? It’s unfortunate but online video viewers compare streaming content to broadcast television. And what do they want from their OTT providers? Something that “works”… and works well. Viewers are used to service providers, like their cable operators, who have direct visibility into their set-top box (STB) and can troubleshoot quality issues over the phone. Because of that, viewer expectations, like John’s, leave little room for error. In fact, according to a study by the University of Amherst, Massachusetts and Akamai in 2012, viewers will leave a video if it doesn’t start within five seconds of requesting it6.

The start time is only one component of QoS. As defined by the Streaming Video Alliance in their “Key Network Delivery Metrics”7 all OTT providers and video distributors should measure the following key metrics:

• Video Start-up Time (seconds)—The amount of time from the initiation of the play event until the first frame of network delivered video is rendered. • Re-buffering Ratio (%)—The percentage of time that a viewer experiences re-buffering issues (i.e. when video stops playing because of buffer underflow, and not due directly to user intervention such as scrubbing or pause). The ratio is calculated as total re-buffering time divided by the sum of total playing time plus total re-buffering time. • Average Media Bit Rate (bits per second)—This metric shows average bitrate at which content was delivered. It is calculated as the number of bits received and decoded during play divided by the total playing time. • Video Start Failure (yes or no)—When the first chunk of video is not fully delivered within time cut-off (~10s) from the initiation of the play event.

Without data about these metrics, OTT providers and content distributors don’t have the insight they need to ensure that the online video experience is analogous to traditional TV. And, yet, these metrics are very one-sided. They address only the player or client experience. But ensuring top-notch QoS must include data about delivery.

What is Content Availability? According to Jan Ozer, a streaming industry veteran and writer for Streaming Media Magazine, the “Job No. 1 for all streaming producers is making sure that the content is properly formatted and available. 7”

1 Akamai 2 Akamai 3 University of Massachusetts, Amherst/Akamai 4 Parks and Associates 5 Parks and Associates 6 University of Massachusetts, Amherst/Akamai 7 http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Measure-it-Improve-it-For-Video- Publishers-QoE-and-QoS-are-Critical-119646.aspx

Imagine an adaptive bitrate (ABR) package with five bitrates: 3.5mbps, 2mbps, 1mbps, 750kbps, and 500kbps. Two of those bitrates, though, suddenly stop working correctly—the 1mbps and 750kpbs bitrates, when requested, now return errors. The content is no longer available.

Content availability refers to the consistent, constant availability of all bitrates and streams. Unfortunately, in today’s streaming operations paradigm, not all bitrates are being monitored. This leaves the majority of issues to surface reactive (as a result of customer complaints) and not proactively.

Without key data from the CDN, for example, it’s near impossible to completely trace performance- related issues, even when player metrics may be signaling a perfectly good service! In fact, some of those delivery metrics can actually lead to complete interruptions in service, irreparably damaging the QoS and contributing to viewer churn which severely impacts the bottom line.

The Cost of a Poor QoS Delivering a poor Quality of Service can have serious revenue implications. Consider the following:

Figure 1: Revenue Impact Scenario of Poor QoE

As illustrated in Figure 1, this fictitious OTT provider (perhaps the same provider whom John questioned) may lose close to $1.5M a year, directly attributed to subscriber churn8. Perhaps even more surprising is the cost of

8 There are a number of assumptions in the scenario illustrated in Figure 1. First, the “% of Subs Who Churn” is derived from Parks and Associates data. Second, we have set a monthly service fee of $10. Third, the cost to

supporting disgruntled customers who, although electing to stay with the service, cost $12.00 per incidence of poor QoS. So, what can you do to prevent this kind of staggering financial impact? In short order, OTT service providers must commit to a new approach of monitoring their online video streams and assets.

The Strategy of “Continuous Monitoring” Relying on viewers to notify an OTT provider of issues with content availability only exacerbates the financial impact outlined in Figure 1. More calls equate with more lost revenue. The key to breaking this cycle is being proactive rather than reactive. And that requires service providers to continually monitor each bitrate stream 24/7. By doing so the provider ensures problematic bitrates, whether stand-alone or part of an ABR package, are addressed even before users log in.

But manually monitoring every bit rate 24/7 isn’t practical. A service provider would need an army of operations personnel to adopt a proactive mindset. And what happens when the number of streams grows? Scaling a continuous monitoring strategy and approach will demand more resources. Thankfully, there’s a solution. Based in the cloud StreamCAM™ provides automated content availability monitoring without the installation of in-player SDK’s or hardware components.

StreamCAM™ StreamCAM™ is a revolutionary approach to ensuring the best OTT video viewing experience. By actively monitoring your CDN delivery in real-time, your operations team can fix stream quality problems before a disaster.

Figure 2: StreamCAM™ high-level architecture

handle a customer call is derived from {need source}. Finally, the annual churn rate is pulled from Parks and Associates.

How does it work? Simple. We configure your OTT streams in the StreamCAM™ platform and the system does the rest. The StreamCAM™ cloud-based monitoring agents work 24/7 to synthetically test all stream bitrates and proactively inform you when one is failing or is suffering from performance-related issues.

Figure 3: StreamE2E Dashboard

And how is that data presented? Either through a rich, robust dashboard (Figure 3) or via RESTful APIs. Either way, StreamCAM™ makes the data available the way you need it.

But don’t take our word for it. Listen to a customer tell their story about how StreamCAM™ helped them address the challenge providing a great QoS with their online video.

Seven West Media — a case study Seven West Media is one of Australia’s leading integrated media companies, with a market-leading presence in broadcast television, magazine and newspaper publishing and online. The company is home to many of Australia’s best performing media businesses—Seven, 7TWO and 7mate, 7flix, Pacific Magazines, The West Australian, and Yahoo!7. Seven West Media is also committed to the delivery of content through a variety of digital channels and platforms. Hosting many of Australia’s marquee sporting events such as the Australian Open and the 2018 Winter Olympics as well as dramas and news, their Total Video OTT offering with over 43 live 24/7 HD channels can reach over 300,000 concurrent viewers for large events.

Hailing from the traditional broadcast world where five 9s availability is expected, Seven West Media understands what it means to provide a high-quality television experience. And their operations staff does so with a bevy of industry tools that have been honed and improved upon for decades.

There are new challenges when it comes to OTT. Without similar tools, process and data, it’s nearly impossible to assure an equal level of resiliency and quality-of-service that end-users demand. Seven West Media already

employs a host of SaaS resources to help them monitor a variety of services throughout the streaming video workflow including: ingest, origin, encoding, and playback. But they were lacking in one area—CDN visibility. They had no way to know about the health of the delivery network and its edge caches. As such, they were flying partially blind when debugging service-related issues with linear streams.

To solve this problem they needed more data. But most solutions promising data on CDN performance required heavy integration. They needed something they could turn up quickly, scale transparently, and provide the information needed to make quick, real-time decisions about stream delivery.

Seven West Media turned to Touchstream to help them solve the problem with CDN performance monitoring. The Touchstream StreamCAM™ solution enabled them to capture data without installing an any additional components into their delivery workflow. StreamCAM™ worked seamlessly with Seven West Media’s existing infrastructure to provide a minute-by-minute health check on their streaming services enabling them to make real- time business decisions. The use of StreamCAM™ significantly changed the way Seven West Media approached debugging quality-of-service problems—it enabled them to be proactive, even providing data back to their CDN providers about issues on a certain stream, at a certain time and in a certain region.

Conclusion Viewers like John are very discerning when it comes to their online video Quality of Service. As they transition from broadcast to more online video (via OTT services) they want the assurance their streaming video will operate in the same fashion as the television with which they have become so familiar. But for OTT providers to bridge the gap between the two video experiences, they must not only monitor from the playback side (using such metrics as those provided by the Streaming Video Alliance) but from the delivery side as well. In short, OTT service providers must commit to proactive, continuous monitoring. But doing so by throwing people at the problem isn’t tenable or scalable long-term.

Enter Touchstream’s cloud-based StreamCAM™ solution. Through its synthetic monitoring platform, OTT service providers and video distributors can provide 24/7 monitoring of every bitrate they are delivering, ensuring that problems are solved before users even log in.

The results speak for themselves—a reduction in call and support volume and less churning subscribers - both of which positively impact the bottom line.