NAB Show Amplified: From the Desk of Touchstream

Brenton Ough, CEO and co-founder of Touchstream, reveals what products and technologies Touchstream will be showing in its pod at the 2023 NAB Show, which takes place at the Las Vegas Convention Center April 15–19. Touchstream will be showcasing monitoring solutions for streaming video operators in Pod W3421F in the West Hall’s Connect Experiential Zone during NAB Show.

What has your company been working on since the last NAB Show?

The ISP domain has always been a blind-spot between CDNs and player analytics where the majority of critical streaming issues occur, leaving both OTT operators and viewers frustrated. On one side, operators are unable to identify the location of a streaming issue’s root cause, hence bad Quality of Experience (QoE), and on the other, viewers expect premium QoE when paying for a premium service. This domain is the last significant area in OTT monitoring without any crucial deep instrumentation.

Taking into consideration the real-time issues highlighted by our customers, Touchstream has specifically designed and built a new CDN-ISP monitoring tool to support superior QoE. ISP Insights empowers streaming operators giving them a powerful layer of visualisation of the issues previously invisible and unreachable to solve, enabling faster troubleshooting with less resources. ISP Insights’ granular KPI capability at scale is integral to streaming NOC operations when pinpointing issues. It underpins streaming engineers in their delivery of a superior QoE.

What products or product categories are you highlighting at the 2023 NAB Show?

Touchstream, the industry leader in end-to-end monitoring for streaming video operators, will be launching a new product named ISP Insights at NAB 2023. This addition to Touchstream’s Virtual NOC solution provides data insights into the health of connections between CDN edge nodes and Internet Service Providers (ISP) by their unique Autonomous System Number (ASN).

Streaming operators have a blindspot today in their end-to-end monitoring: they cannot see data about the ISP. This blindspot hinders their ability to quickly and efficiently resolve Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) issues which might cause viewers to have a poor experience and ultimately churn from the service. Touchstream has solved this problem through a unique summarisation approach.

All streaming operators use powerful dashboard and data tools like Splunk, but all of that real-time log data, even when visualised in a good dashboard, doesn’t provide insight. Operators are still forced to figure out the data that indicates the problem and then how it connects to other data sets. Our unique summarisation approach, powered by highly scalable Lambda functions, quickly identifies when the data flow from CDN to ISP is causing problems and enables operators to drill down into KPIs where they can quickly find the problem and rally vendors to solve issues before they cause churn with subscribers.

What recent technology developments do you think are the most exciting for the media and entertainment industry?

Only in the last 12 months have all the commercial CDNs supported real-time log delivery of CDN access logs. Now, when faced with a video delivery issue, a CDN’s customer can finally have complete access to real-time data logs that contain detailed information about end-viewer requests that the CDN receives. However, the vast volume of data and the way these logs are presented requires complex processing. This makes it challenging for content providers to gather all relevant metrics into one focused solution to get to the real cause of an issue.

ISP Insights introduces a new approach to the high-performance video data flow and dashboarding that allows visualisation and detection of streaming issues between CDNs and ISPs. Using a summarisation engine with data optimisation techniques in combination with ultra fast efficient dashboards, the solution unlocks critical insights into the vast amount of data between the CDN edge nodes and ASN pairs.

The solution is designed to be secure, efficient and economical. Rather than ingesting the raw CDN log data, Touchstream provides a summarisation plugin that resides in the customer domain. With this all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data remains in the customer domain, making the solution completely secure by design. Finally but equally important, with no need to re-ingest the log data the solution is extremely cost-effective.

Touchstream’s ISP Insights ushers in a new era of essential deep visibility of OTT delivery and troubleshooting, allowing even greater control over QoE resulting in improved net promoter score (NPS) and reduced churn.

About Touchstream
Touchstream is the OTT operations hub for monitoring and preventing stream errors in end-to-end OTT workflows. This operations-friendly tool continuously monitors all stream endpoints, and empowers streaming engineers and operations teams to independently and proactively improve QoS with data from across your on-premise, cloud, and hybrid workflows. Touchstream monitors over 25,000 live streams daily with CDN delivery performance monitoring from over 100 global locations. From America’s largest annual live sporting event to the world’s biggest streaming broadcasters, enterprise OTT streamers with live and 24/7 channels benefit most from Touchstream’s offer.

For more information, visit https://go.touchstream.media/start-monitoring.