Category: Media & Entertainment

Categories
Media & Entertainment

Delivering captivating entertainment experiences

How connected platforms and streaming firms can consistently deliver great CX across complex content delivery networks and ensure the highest levels of quality of experience (QoE)

As the streaming wars intensify, delivering an exceptional customer experience becomes a key differentiator in gaining and retaining subscribers. It’s not just about the content anymore, viewers want a high-quality, engaging, and enriching experience that caters to their needs and desires.

Delivering a brilliant customer experience (CX) and helping digital companies navigate the complex content consumption and delivery ecosystem is critical. Digital companies must contend with multiple variables and validate engineering and customer views of QoE KPIs to ensure optimal experiences.

Major challenges in assuring delightful customer experiences include:

  • Siloed data platforms – A central data hare that collects and correlates data for predictive insights from multiple sources is critical.
  • Lack of continuous monitoring – Implementing a continuous monitoring mechanism for all the critical CX impacting backend video services (100s of microservices) can be difficult
  • Issues with performance tracking – Measuring and monitoring audio/video performance KPIs (such as MOS, re-buffering, slow start-up time, etc.) can be complex


Customer Experience Assurance (CXA) framework continuously enhances engineering and customers’ view of QoE – positioning the company for continued leadership.

Categories
Media & Entertainment

Keeping ahead of the rapid changes in media services

Shifting to an enhanced order management system for FTTP-based IPTV

Order management is important to the success of any business but is especially critical for Internet Protocol television (IPTV) providers. IPTV is a service that provides television programs and other video content using the Internet Protocol (IP) such as Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) suite, as opposed to broadcast TV, cable TV, or satellite signals.

The deployment of FTTP-based IPTV service entails a significant initial investment for service providers. This investment is not only for the underlying network infrastructure but also for the customer order management process, including customer profiling, field worker density, and query resolution needed to provide a sophisticated IPTV experience. But FTTP-IPTV order management is operationally complex, often entailing dozens of sub-processes that involve multiple systems, departments, and partner organizations, which not only affects delivery and drive-up costs, but also negatively impacts customer satisfaction. Despite the challenges of order management, service providers must get it right to thrive in today’s increasingly competitive FTTP-IPTV market.

Service providers must carefully plan and qualify their requirements for an order management system to maximize the return on investment while providing a good quality experience to the subscribers. This Insight provides a master checklist template to aid service providers in effectively streamlining the qualification process for an order management system. Using the checklist, service providers can decrease costs, achieve faster roll-out, and increase customer satisfaction with FTTP-IPTV.

Service providers must deploy an effective order management system to maximize the ROI while providing a good quality of experience to the customers.

Categories
Media & Entertainment

Deliver uninterrupted, high-quality entertainment services

Build an effective monitoring framework to ensure high performance of microservices-based streaming services

The multi-fold increase in video content consumption and the different types of devices like mobiles, laptops, and smart TVs used to consume this content have made service providers move towards microservices. Most of the forward-thinking service providers have started adopting microservice-based architecture for the Video-on-Demand (VoD) services to handle the huge number of requests with minimum response time. Further, it enables scalability and continuous deployment of complex applications, thus providing uninterrupted entertainment services. Adoption of microservices-based applications helps to reap benefits such as:

  • Deliver video at scale to meet billions of customer requests each day
  • Handle the load spikes efficiently during special events (e.g. Premier League football games)
  • Ensure reliable delivery and availability of video content services
  • Implement auto-scaling algorithms to save cost by running at optimum capacity during silent hours


The adoption of microservices-based applications helps service providers to deliver entertainment services at scale, meeting billions of customer requests each day.

However, monitoring microservice-based applications is a highly complex task as a single application runs on multiple hosts in a very dynamic environment. It also needs to interact with several other systems that are dynamic. Implementing the right toolchain is critical for effective performance monitoring of microservice-based applications.