Video now represents almost half of all mobile network traffic, and for mobile operators it is a decidedly mixed blessing. Mobile video motivates users to buy more data, but if it is not managed properly it can bring the network to its knees.
Software that optimizes video for mobile networks through techniques like caching, adaptive streaming and real-time encoding is a key investment for an increasing number of mobile operators. But in order to fully utilize these solutions, carriers need to understand where and when video is crippling the network. Many traditional network analytics solutions offer visibility into data traffic, but do not adequately distinguish video from other data traffic.
“Operators are missing lots and lots of video,” said Jason Guesman, senior vice president of sales and business development at Opera Software’s Skyfire unit, a video optimization specialist. “They think they know what’s happening in their network but the information is flawed. Misinformation is worse than no information.”
Skyfire is one of a handful of software companies with an analytics solution tailored for video. Today the company introduced Rocket Insights, an analytics dashboard to help operators understand their video traffic. Stall rates, video start times, bitrate distribution and mean opinion score can be monitored and analyzed to show operators strengths and weaknesses in the network based on geographies, times of day, user groups, and content providers.
“If the network is struggling, a video application is really going to show that to the customer,” said Guesman. “They don’t blame Samsung, they don’t blame the publisher, nine times out of ten they are going to blame the operator. And so what Rocket Insights does is help operators get their arms around what kind of OTT video is on the network, where it’s coming from, and what kind of experience the network is delivering.”
Operators can see how often users are encountering buffering and stalling and can see mean opinion (relative MOS) scores to evaluate video quality. Guesman said that within a carrier organization, the three main customers for Skyfire’s solution are marketing teams, network planners and operations teams. The solution can be deployed independently of Skyfire’s Rocket Optimizer solution, but it does show operators an estimate of the savings they can achieve if they do deploy Rocket Optimizer.
Operators will be much more likely to invest in optimization solutions if they can be confident that they are identifying and understanding their video traffic, so video analytics is a key precursor to optimization. Skyfire is one of several software companies that is addressing both these markets.
Openwave Mobility says that in order to accurately detect video, software needs to evaluate the payload. “We detect video in the most definitive manner,” said Indranil Chatterjee, vice president of product management, marketing and strategy at Openwave Mobility. “We look at the payload and we look at the first 200 bytes, and then detect video. We do not look at URLs or any other signatures which, at best, will be 80-90% correct.”
For more information on video optimization, click here to register for our upcoming video optimization webinar, featuring analyst Patrick Lopez of Core Analysis, as well as Skyfire’s Jason Guesman and other industry players.
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