In today’s dynamic video market, service providers have adapted and evolved their services in sync with the technology evolution in customer devices, mobility, and preferred ways to interact with entertainment content.
As a result of innovation and growth, some complexity and fragmentation have unavoidably occurred. For instance, IPTV over ABR services is run together with companion services on user-owned devices like connected TVs, phones and laptops. Additionally, value-added services, such as catch-up and start-over, live together with PVR, third-party AVOD, as well as targeted advertising.
An approach towards cost efficiency and high video performance
With the development of these services came an increased demand for observability and insights. This frequently resulted in fragmented observability and monitoring tools tailored to specific technologies and delivery platforms. Ownership and control of data can also be an issue, along with potential lock-in effects.
Agama strongly believes that this evolution represents a great opportunity for increased efficiency, lower cost and higher agility for service providers.
Using a single observability platform where every stakeholder has access to necessary data and insights on the video delivery performance, customer experience and behavior departments can drastically reduce the complexity in managing all their video services and lowering integration cost. With open interfaces to interoperate with external systems, the service provider can be sure any type of processing and integration can be done.
Navigating the challenges of fragmented data
There can often be large amounts of data from different systems in the forms of logs and events. Some of these systems are vendor solutions that expose logs and metrics, or ad-hoc solutions built in-house to solve specific problems as they have occurred.
The natural result is that metrics and definitions diverge, making a comprehensive and unified analysis difficult. Tracking video delivery and customer experiences across different technologies and platforms becomes a real challenge, requiring data to be normalized and separate integrations towards these systems to be built.
What consolidation can do
Let’s imagine a situation where you no longer need to manage and analyze data from a multitude of disparate systems, instead having a single top-level view. This unified visibility ensures that different teams can see service performance and customer experience in real-time. This helps them troubleshoot effectively and make data-driven decisions in their processes, resulting in improving user experiences for their subscribers.
Consolidation allows video providers to:
- Reduce complexity and costs by eliminating the need for many different integrations and reducing training needs.
- Increase efficiency with workflows and automated processes, freeing up valuable resources in the
- Simplify the vendor interface by reducing the number of solutions deployed.
- Have one single data source for all data, services, and network performance, enabling an understanding of the entire video delivery ecosystem, from content performance to device behavior.
This leads to greater efficiency, enabling teams to accomplish more by reducing unnecessary integration and data clean-up work.
In Operations, having the same system for both ABR delivered services and classical IPTV or Cable ensures that the customer experience comes front and center – ensuring that all work with the customer pushes in the direction of resolving any issues for them. With performance and quality metrics from active probes in the head-end and network, issues can be triangulated effectively with comparison of service quality from the customer device or app.
Product teams, with the same integration, can leverage insights into customer behavior and engagement of all types of services for every platform. They can directly see usage and quality figures and collaborate between Ops and Product.
Customer Care teams can benefit greatly from a unified data system, by helping support care agents to quickly understand customer experience for all kinds of services: OTT, IPTV or cable. It can benefit greatly from a unified data system, as agents can access comprehensive customer profiles, historical interactions, and real-time feedback.
By understanding audience demographics, content preferences, and engagement patterns, marketing and content teams can develop and deliver content that resonates with viewers, driving increased viewership and subscriber retention.
Summary
As presented in this article, there are many opportunities to create insights faster and simpler with a consolidated approach. By consolidating data from various sources, video service providers can streamline operations, align teams, and empower customers, ultimately delivering a superior service experience.
We hope that this has gotten you interested – if so, please contact johan.gorsjo@agama.tv for a discussion on how consolidation could benefit your organization.
About Johan Görsjö
Johan leads the Product and Development, responsible for revolutionizing Agama’s products and solutions. He works with Product Strategy and closely with Sales and Marketing.
Johan has over 20 years of experience in the Telecom and Video industry.
