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For most pay-TV operators, the world is a shifting place. New dynamics in play include an exploding amount of on-demand content, the advent of over-the-top players like Netflix and Hulu, and set-top-box players like Roku and Boxee, the need to integrate more interactive functionality into their TV services, and, of course, the proliferation of TV Everywhere to connected devices like iPads, smartphones and laptops. The competitive stakes are high; consumers are fickle. Getting the service experience right means the difference between profitability and obsolescence. Amid an exploding amount of service assurance data, business intelligence tools for accurately interpreting the information into actionable intelligence have become critical.
Expanding the Role of BI in Broadcast
When it comes to probes and monitoring tools, test and measurement and service assurance for broadcast networks, typically those tools return data that the operations personnel are looking at on a minute-to-minute, hour-by-hour basis. That means the information is relevant to four to six people, typically, at any given moment. Standard reporting dashboards give good visibility over time as to how different channels are performing, or can compare different monitoring sites. They also provide a scorecard view for offering a snapshot of key metrics and how things are performing.
BI, however, can harness that information and make it relevant to plethora of people in vastly different job descriptions from the operations team. It expands access to the information in a way that draws in a wide variety of non-network focused stakeholders throughout a pay-TV operator's organization. And in that way, BI is invaluable to building new TV business models.
As an example, "in absence of BI, a marketer that may want to know about the consumption and performance of a specific video offer could try to meet with the operations team," explains Charlie Russell, senior IP video product manager at EXFO Service Assurance. "But that operations team will say something like, 'I guess it’s pretty good.' There’s a whole area of guesswork and anecdotal information. That's because they don’t focus on individual services; it’s more that if a router goes down, there's a red light situation, panic, and a rolling of trucks."
But with BI, he notes, you can slice and dice information by topology, service provider, time of day, TV tier or content type. Thus, that marketer can tell that people that are paying for platimum service are actually getting what they pay for – and if they aren't, they can isolate the issues and provide smarter packages.
BI also can roll up new types of metrics not found in standard operational dashboards, such as a media quality index. That looks at different aspects of quality, and then calculates what amounts to a Quality of Experience (QoE) metric. If QoS is how well the netwok did, QoE abstracts the network metric to user metrics and explains how the user actually experienced the network's performance.
