Delivering the best streaming experience, whether it’s for a live sporting event, 24/7 programming channels, or personalized advertisements, requires rapid visibility into the end-to-end streaming workflow performance. When you have to monitor at least a half dozen services in the workflow, and a multitude of end device types, the observability and speed of detecting issues can make the difference in terms of delivering a good quality of experience (QoE) to your viewers.
Watch the webinar When Ad and Video Delivery Meet Business Impact, with Tal Shalom, Principal Solutions Engineer at Hydrolix, and Phil Harrison, Senior Product Manager of Elemental Media Services, AWS. The webinar, presented by AWS and Hydrolix, includes a demo that shows how the solution helps streaming companies improve QoE and increase revenue.
Each service in the streaming workflow generates its own logs. Altogether, these logs can add up to terabytes a day, and even a terabyte a minute in some cases. When correlated and analyzed, the data shows operations events such as video buffering, network errors, and ad fill delays. However, if those insights are not presented quickly, in one view, it may be too late to fix them, leading to a negative experience for your customers that potentially impacts the bottom line.
Companies that stream events need a fast way to identify issues throughout the streaming process from encoding to delivery, and they need to be able to identify who is impacted. They need to understand the QoE of their users and make mitigation decisions in seconds rather than minutes. Log data can provide that information, but only when it’s correlated, analyzed, and unified. And that’s a big challenge for many streaming companies—bringing the insights they need together in one place.
AWS, Hydrolix, and Datazoom are raising the bar in streaming content and ad delivery experience. With their joint solution, streaming companies can quickly detect issues throughout the entire workflow, then minimize the impact on viewers. The next diagram shows how Hydrolix for AWS integrates with services like CloudFront and MediaLive to provide end-to-end streaming observability.
Here’s how the solutions work together. AWS MediaLive encodes and compresses video so it’s ready for delivery to all types of devices. AWS MediaTailor inserts ads into the stream, and Datazoom shows performance insights for video and ads from client devices. Hydrolix provides the observability platform, which includes analytics and storage, allowing teams to unify and correlate their data in a single place. Hydrolix ingests log data from Datazoom, AWS MediaLive, and MediaTailor, and others in the stack such as Amazon CloudFront, correlates and analyzes that data, then delivers performance insights within seconds even when ingesting terabyte volumes of data on a daily basis. The data is presented in a single, unified dashboard so companies can easily spot and fix issues in real time.
Media and streaming companies use the joint solution to increase operational visibility, correlate business metrics and operations metrics, and improve QoE.
Let’s take ad delivery as an example. Datazoom integrates with AWS Elemental Media Services. The solution collects hundreds of data points from each client. This data shows insights such as ad playback performance, completion percentage, and video display quality. Streaming providers want to know how much issues like ad rebuffering cost the company. With Datazoom and Elemental, they can see when viewers abandoned the ad, and which ads weren’t delivered because of abandonment. But without correlating the data in one place, those data points and others sit in multiple dashboards. And with other data analytics solutions, the amount of data can be difficult to ingest, process, and analyze. Datazoom and Elemental generate logs for each media request. A three-second segment can generate more than one thousand logs per viewer. There can be billions of log records an hour.
That’s where Hydrolix provides value. Hydrolix scales to Super Bowl volume while providing cost-effective real-time analytics storage, ensuring that teams get full-fidelity data even during major events.
Hydrolix, AWS Elemental, and Datazoom make real time detection and end to end visibility possible while providing deep insights for both operations and business intelligence.
Next Steps
- To dive deeper into the challenges this joint solution solves, and how Hydrolix, AWS, and Datazoom solve it, watch the webinar When Ad and Video Delivery Meet Business Impact.
- Learn more about Hydrolix for AWS.
- Contact Hydrolix about a proof of concept or demo.
