Actus’ OTT Monitoring Solution: OTT StreamWatch

OTT (Over-The-Top) Video Quality Assurance Monitoring

What is OTT Monitoring and How Actus Solves Its Challenges

Over-The-Top (OTT) monitoring refers to the process of analyzing and monitoring the performance and quality of OTT   streaming services. Traditionally, network operation centre (NOC) engineers have no way of knowing about the quality of their live video streams and all the renditions (MBR) received by their OTT viewers until they get complaints or rely on the statistics provided by their CDN that they are meeting the Service Level Agreements (SLA) requirements. Both these are not efficient and result in loss of quality of stream and service for the end user (creating subscriber churn – the biggest issue within the OTT stream business model).

To provide robust and successful streaming services, content operators must monitor their OTT streams.

Actus OTT StreamWatch is a comprehensive OTT solution for Quality Assurance Monitoring at any point within, or every critical point throughout complex OTT workflows – from source feeds to transcoding and packaging, all the way through returns from CDN Origin and Cache Servers.

Monitor your OTT streams in real-time to resolve video playback issues, buffering rates and gain insights from user engagement to increase the user’s Quality of Experience.

OTT Quality-of-Experience (QoE) and

Quality-of-Service (QoS)

Quality Assurance Monitoring Solutions

Actus OTT monitoring solution brings the entire monitoring process into a single user interface where engineers can visually see all related data from encoding to distribution with simplicity and clarity to locate any issues with the streaming experience for the end user.

Our OTT software includes a one-stop control center, monitoring all renditions within variable bit-rate (VBR) and adaptive bit-rate (ABR) streams. In addition to a live view of each of the various resolutions and bitrates, it provides Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS) assessment, transport statistics, current and historic evaluations, alarm status, SCTE event tracking (showing actual SCTE message detail), and a list of Ad-insert opportunities with alert notifications.

With Actus’ OTT system, email/SMS/SNMP and other notifications can be sent when alert parameters are violated for QoE issues (such as missing/frozen video, audio too low/too high/missing, missing captions/subtitles) as well as any QoS issues (such as errors for Media HTTP, Media Decryption, Manifest HTTP, Manifest Parsing, SCTE Parsing, and SCTE Missing).

Live OTT video streams (one or many renditions) can be displayed on multiviewers (at one or many workflow probe-points) highlighting affected renditions/probe-points as issues occur.

Actus Mixed OTAOTT Multiviewer

Real-time Live Stream OTT & HLS Monitoring – Provide Optimal Quality to Your Viewers

Actus OTT monitoring provides tremendous value with in-depth QoE, and QoS HTTP Live Stream (HLS) and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) assessment of all renditions returned from various nodes throughout the distribution chain on their way to viewers, including source, encoders/decoders, and multiple CDN returns at several geographical locations.

Operators monitor the performance, and technical aspects of the HLS stream live through a rich dashboard, and if any problems are discovered, the solution will alert engineers to issues that genuinely impact the viewers’ experience – without overloading them with details that do not impact quality.

Our monitoring solution monitors and alerts on problems for all HLS renditions through several geographical locations. The over-the-top monitoring system inspects the HLS delivery at the HTTP level, the Manifest level up to the content level. There is no need to record every rendition to provide the data.

Through a rich dashboard, operators can watch, in real-time, the performance and technical aspects of the HLS stream to ensure the OTT live stream quality is maintained throughout the broadcasting.

With the growth of FAST and IPTV streaming channels delivered over unmanaged networks, the OTT distribution model requires monitoring of these channels and their range of resolutions and speeds, to assure quality throughout a complex distribution chain.

Actus R&D innovated advanced competencies and launched the new Actus OTT StreamWatch to address the challenge of maintaining streaming quality on the affordable and easy-to-use Actus platform.

OTT StreamWatch can be deployed for a single OTT stream at one probe-point or configured to enable large-volume OTT content owners, streaming service providers, and broadcasters to quickly address issues and maintain optimal quality for their viewers.

A Comprehensive OTT Monitoring Solution

Actus OTT monitoring solution brings the entire monitoring process into a single user interface where engineers can visually see all related data from encoding to distribution with simplicity and clarity to locate any issues with the streaming experience for the end user.

Our OTT software includes a one-stop control centre, monitoring all renditions within variable bit-rate (VBR) and adaptive bit rate (ABR) streams.

The many features and benefits included in OTT StreamWatch make it an incredible asset to your OTT workflow, including:

    • Assessments and reports of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE)
    • Multiviewers that display many renditions and/or probe-points side-by-side with onscreen alerts
    • The ability to send email/SMS notifications 24×7
    • Analysis of embedded SCTE Dynamic Ad Insertion messages
    • The ability to check the presence of CC and alert if missing
    • Recordings of native HLS with all renditions for proof-of-airing that can be shared for regulatory compliance, for ad-verification, and for investigating Quality of Service data to improve long term stream quality

Quality-of-Service (QoS) Analysis

Our OTT StreamWatch analyzes OTT QoS at the manifest, the encryption, and the HTTP level, to evaluate bandwidth requirements, streaming media download times and buffering issues for each rendition within Adaptable Bit Rate streams. Therefore, operators can recognize and address potential issues before they impact viewer quality.

Quality-of-Experience (QoE) Alerts

Keeping it simple – our OTT monitoring solution StreamWatch alerts engineers to the issues that affect a viewers’ OTT viewing experience without inundating them with false alerts and disrupting viewing quality.

We Make Comprehensive OTT Monitoring Affordable

Actus OTT StreamWatch is the first product to make it economically feasible for even the smallest of IPTV Channels and OTT broadcasters to monitor their content and maintain quality throughout their entire workflow, enabling engineers to pinpoint precisely where issues originate and quickly remedy them.

OTT StreamWatch can be purchased as a turnkey system with perpetual software licenses or as a SaaS solution on AWS/any public cloud or a customer’s Virtual Machine infrastructure or private cloud..

Key Features

Native OTT Formats

Supports native HLS, MPEG DASH, CMAF

Browser-Based Multiviewer

Unlimited easily-customizable multiviewers for visibility of live streams

Technical Dashboard

Single dashboard for identification of QoE, QoS, SCTE and other issues

Organized Content

Intuitive GUI to handle hundreds of OTT channels or probe-points

Drill Down into QoS Data

Zooms from overview of all HLS network activity to individual HTTP/network requests

Smart Reports

Reports with comprehensive insights and link to video recordings from any moment

Integrates OTT with OTA

Integrates with TS and traditional broadcast OTA/baseband formats

QoE and QoS Alerting

Define parameters for QoE and QoS alert notifications throughout workflow

Versatile Clipping

Advanced clipping for collaboration, compliance, and repurposing

These OTT monitoring benefits are added to Actus Digital’s already comprehensive features for quality alerting, compliance logging, multiviewer, and aircheck recording. They further condense tools needed by Engineers and enable them to do their jobs better and easier than ever before. All of this in one platform that combines all input formats, at multiple points in the video distribution chain, for broadcast IP, SDI, ASI, 2110, etc., and OTT (HLS, etc.) content.

The Actus all-in-one solution has the highest streams and channels density to save hardware costs.

OTT Monitoring and Compliance Logging – In One Intelligent Monitoring Platform

Actus Digital provides the industry’s most intelligent broadcast media platform and by adding the OTT monitoring tool StreamWatch to a new or existing Actus Intelligent Monitoring Platform, installation enables the use of one interface for both professional broadcast workflows (Transport Stream OTA Quality Assurance (QA) and compliance) as well as professional OTT delivery workflows (HLS and other formats of OTT QA and compliance).

From our Blog/News

IBC 2024 Insights & Takeaways

IBC 2024 Insights & Takeaways

At IBC 2024, Actus Digital unveiled new multiviewer features, enhanced AI-driven Media Insight for smarter content monitoring, and seamless integration with DataMiner for centralized control and real-time alerts. Our intuitive, scalable platform continues to receive praise for its reliability and ability to unify compliance logging, OTT monitoring, and technical workflows—all in one system.

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