In the hyper-competitive world of live streaming, maintaining top-notch quality is a primary goal for streaming services. Imagine the anticipation surrounding a live sporting event or the premiere of a highly anticipated TV series. Viewers eagerly tune in, excited to be part of the action in real-time. As the stream buffers or quality dips, that excitement turns to frustration. These moments are not just about streaming quality— they’re about retaining viewers and capitalizing on revenue opportunities.
With the demand for seamless viewing experiences, the challenge lies in identifying and addressing streaming issues before they disrupt viewer experience. Addressing service quality can be broken down into two approaches, client-side (reactive) analytics based on media player metrics and synthetic (proactive) performance analysis from dedicated tools focused on quality assessment.
| Synthetic – Proactive ABR Live Streaming | Client-Side – Reactive Media Player in Streaming Application | |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Employs synthetic clients to detect and resolve potential streaming issues before they impact viewers. | Relies on analytics within client devices to react to issues as they occur. |
| Management | Deployed at strategic locations post-origin server and monitor based on configured schedules. | Integrated in the streaming application, enabling analytics when the streaming service is in use. |
| Insights | Accessibility, variant availability, network streaming performance, and optionally content analysis. | Device level compatibility, decryption key acquisition, delivery streaming performance. |
In a landscape where viewer retention is paramount, the choice between proactive and reactive monitoring methods can make all the difference in maintaining a loyal subscriber base.
Let’s take a closer look at ABR live streaming and the media player so we can better understand the benefits of both monitoring techniques.
What is ABR Live Streaming?
ABR (Adaptive Bitrate) streaming technology enables service providers to deliver high-quality video content seamlessly across a diverse range of devices and network conditions, ensuring that viewers enjoy a consistent and satisfying viewing experience wherever they are. It’s a crucial component of modern video streaming services, helping providers meet the growing expectations of today’s viewers for reliable, high-quality content delivery. The most popular streaming protocols are Apple HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) and MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). Each protocol has its nuances to achieve the same end goal, reach any device type that’s connected to the internet.
Both HLS and DASH allow the video stream to dynamically adjust the quality of the video based on the available network conditions and the capabilities of the viewer’s device. The goal is to provide the best user experience.
Optimal Viewing Experience: Service providers aim to deliver the best possible viewing experience to their customers across a wide range of devices (smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc.) and network connections (Wi-Fi, mobile, etc.). ABR streaming accomplishes this by dynamically adapting the video quality to suit each viewer’s specific circumstances. This ensures that viewers receive a consistent and enjoyable experience regardless of their device type or network conditions. To provide the best quality, service providers typically create bitrate variants using different bandwidths, resolutions, and codecs to address a wide range of device types. With this in mind, it’s inaccurate to categorize any one bitrate as more or less important without considering viewer behavior for the type of programming. Perhaps there are more viewers for live sports on large screen displays, while other content is more likely to be viewed on tablets during a morning workout routine. Each of those streaming environments is going to demand a different variant type for the desired outcome, a happy viewer.
How Media Players Work on Live Streaming Services
To anchor the differences between proactive and reactive monitoring approaches, let’s take a quick look at the process a media player in the streaming application follows.
- Initialization: When a streaming client starts playing a live video, it initially requests a manifest file from the streaming server. This manifest file contains metadata about the available video and audio streams, including different bitrate variants, resolutions, and possibly other characteristics like codecs and container formats.
- Variant Selection: Upon receiving the manifest, the client evaluates the available variants based on factors such as the current network bandwidth, device capabilities, and buffer status. It then selects the initial variant to play. Typically, this selection is based on choosing a variant with a bitrate that matches the estimated available bandwidth while aiming for the highest quality possible.
- Segment Download: Once the initial variant is selected, the client starts downloading video segments from the server. These segments are typically a few seconds long.
- Dynamic Adaptation: As the video plays, the client continuously monitors the network conditions and adjusts the variant selection accordingly. If the available bandwidth increases, the client may switch to a higher-quality variant to provide better video quality. Conversely, if the available bandwidth decreases or network congestion occurs, the client may switch to a lower- quality variant to avoid buffering or interruptions.
- Buffer Management: To provide a smooth playback experience, the client maintains a buffer for downloaded video segments. This buffer helps mitigate fluctuations in network conditions and allows for seamless bitrate adaptation. The client dynamically adjusts the buffer size based on factors like available bandwidth, playback rate, and device resources. The buffer depth can vary depending on the client algorithm and whether the protocol is using a low latency standard to be as close as possible to the real-time video.
- Playback Continuity: Throughout the streaming session, the client continuously repeats steps 3- 5, fetching and playing video segments while dynamically adjusting the bitrate as needed. This process ensures that the viewer experiences smooth and uninterrupted playback, even as network conditions fluctuate.
Comparing Client-Side & Synthetic Monitoring
Client-side monitoring excels at identifying issues with specific player devices and client applications that may not support certain bitrates and codecs. It also identifies any issues that might occur with user authentication or authorization, and acquisition of decryption keys. However, when it comes to service availability or streaming performance, the findings might not be as clear. Perhaps there is a last-mile issue or home Wi-Fi issue affecting customers. Problems could be isolated to single CDN or cache within that CDN, all of which could appear like a service provider problem but requires more details to diagnose. Lastly, analytics data for these service interruptions require customers to stream the content to collect data. Are all the bitrates accessible and available? You may never know until the customer complaints come pouring in, if you get notified at all.
Synthetic monitoring like Telestream’s Surveyor ABR Active offers a proactive approach to monitoring streaming services, regardless of viewership and time of day. Although it doesn’t show device or user-level streaming performance, utilizing synthetic clients to simulate the user experiences gives you forewarning about service interruptions before a customer experiences the problem. From accessibility checks, protocol conformance, variant validation, network streaming quality checks like slow startups and buffering delays, and content analysis for video and audio impairments, synthetic monitoring enables platforms to stay one step ahead. Synthetic monitoring provides insights post-origin server down to the edge of the CDN to ensure streaming performance and content quality before it reaches the last-mile and viewers.
Wholistic Approach
When combining these two approaches, network operations teams have immediate access to information from within the provider’s domain of control all the way to the customer premises. Alerts raised by synthetic monitoring can be compared against the user impact. Are they still viewing?
And when issues are reported by clients, synthetic monitoring assists in finding the source of the problem. Is it something I can control at the source or is this a single network location?
Client and synthetic monitoring are not a choice of either or, but instead, a set of cohesive tools that work in concert with each other to deliver an exceptional viewing experience that sets streaming services apart in an increasingly crowded market. The right mix of tools empowers operations teams to gain valuable insights, working fast and efficiently, to delight subscribers with uninterrupted streaming bliss.