‘Many of today’s assurance solutions for OTT focus only on parts of the delivery chain and are not broad enough to understand the customer’s experience of the service delivery’, says Mikael Dahlgren, CEO of Agama Technologies.
OTT technology is now a vital part of today’s video and TV distribution systems, accounting for an increasing part of the operators’ service delivery. Adaptive bitrate over IP is the obvious technology choice for VoD services, regardless if it’s for the main screen or on the go. Streaming video over various internet access technologies has added tremendously to the reach of video services and enabled a massive increase in the amount of video we consume.
As video service operators now rely on OTT technology for their services they want to operate and manage it effectively. This includes everything from customer on-boarding to service operations and customer care. To achieve this, operators need an assurance solution that provides a 360-degree insight into the service performance and usage.
In spite of this, many of today’s assurance solutions for OTT focus on the distribution network performance and do not provide a holistic view of the customer’s experience of how the service is delivered.
At Agama, we believe that to really understand how the customer is experiencing their service, you need an assurance solution that covers the entire service delivery; from service creation, across the distribution network, and all the way to the performance of the player.
The solution needs both passive monitoring to understand service consumption and active testing to verify service availability. Finally, and most importantly, the solution needs to offer powerful analytics capabilities that transform the wealth of data into timely and actionable information for the operator.
With our solid experience and our long-standing focus on end-to-end solutions and customer experience, we are uniquely positioned to support operators in understanding how their services are performing, regardless if they are based on OTT, legacy technologies or a mix thereof.
The opinion piece was first published in the IBC Daily, Saturday issue, September 16, 2017.
