The observability challenge for media streaming

According to a recent study commissioned by Accedo, the majority of global users have high expectations on the streaming services they use. Almost 60% say that they will switch off immediately if the quality of the playback is perceived as too low. A third of respondents say the same about services where the general look and feel of the interface is not to their liking. 

A thoughtfully designed interface plays a crucial part in captivating users by streamlining navigation, improving content discoverability, and refining playback functionality. However, providing a high-quality streaming service that caters to different end-user preferences is tougher to achieve but vital to drive service success. 

In this blog post, Accedo’s Head of Operations, Steven Kopec, and New Relic’s  Industry Solutions Lead and GM M&E, Chris Mccarthy discuss how observability can enable video service providers to meet end-user streaming quality requirements.

What challenges do content providers face in providing a high-quality streaming experience?

Chris (New Relic):

I often hear from my customers that “we need the customer experience to feel just like TV.” The problem, of course, is that TV is delivered over infrastructure that was made for that purpose, while streaming services are delivered over the internet, which is multi-purpose. Then you layer on everything else—authentication, DRM (digital rights management), multi-CDN (content delivery network) routing, personalization, targeted advertising and verification, client device fragmentation—and it’s a very complicated software architecture. And so far I’m just talking about serving the content, not even touching on what it takes to get live or on-demand content processed and delivered to the CDN in the first place!

Steven (Accedo):

I agree with Chris; video streaming services rely on a complex architecture. This complexity increases when backend capabilities or APIs don't align with frontend functionality. For example, issues can arise if a user tries to sort or filter by certain categories or if incomplete metadata causes crashes or slows down development as teams account for when and where metadata is missing and its impact on logic. Coordinating different backends to achieve specific features or functionalities can be highly intricate. 

Another major concern for content providers is device fragmentation, even within a single ecosystem. This fragmentation can consume development cycles that would otherwise enhance the service, such as improving animations, reducing data pop-in, and enhancing error handling and messaging.

What does observability entail and how can content providers leverage it to be proactive instead of reactive to minimize their streaming platform’s issues?

Chris (New Relic): 

Observability is about knowing how all aspects of your architecture are performing at a given time, and how that impacts your business. At New Relic, we believe that means down to the event level: being able to quickly drill down from aggregate alerts like “your buffering rate tripled over the last 30 minutes” to “here is a user session that was affected, along with the request data and CDN logs” to get you to the issue quickly. We find that baking in observability as a requirement throughout the software development lifecycle helps our customers identify issues caused by their development before they occur. Of course, production issues will always happen—you can’t control if your CDN goes down—but a good observability platform and strategy will help you reduce the time to detect and remediate that issue.

Steven (Accedo):

For content providers to be successful, monetization and profitability are crucial. But the main concern that most video service providers face is that they lack a data-driven approach to understand what factors lead to subscriber attrition. An observability platform enables video service providers to identify behavioral patterns of at-risk subscribers and conduct root cause analysis to take targeted actions, such as offering exclusive content or personalized offers. 

Content providers should also leverage an observability platform to measure performance parameters for key metrics such as video delays, user engagement, content consumption patterns, etc., as Chris mentioned, to consistently gauge the success of the platform’s availability for an end user. 

How can observability tools be used not just for troubleshooting/addressing performance issues but also for optimizing the user experience?

Chris (New Relic):

A well-configured observability solution will collect data at the event level, not just aggregated timing metrics, so that customers can derive on-demand insights from the raw user data without having to decide exactly what they want to see and statically place that in their code. Because of our event-based model and scalable time series database, New Relic is very well suited to this type of ad-hoc analysis that uncovers interesting or unexpected user behaviors and helps to optimize the user experience. Additionally, features like session replay and user journeys provide further insights into user behavior and how users interact with the client application.

Steven (Accedo):

Despite years of emphasizing the importance of UX, many in the industry still struggle to perfect it. While it's important to streamline operations and consolidate vendors, these efforts shouldn't take away from delivering a top-notch UX. To truly understand and cater to users, providers need to go beyond surface-level UX design. An observability platform enables content providers to gain insights into user preferences, demographic data, and behavioral data, providing a clearer understanding of what users want. By segmenting and grouping subscribers based on interests and location, providers can offer curated content choices to specific user segments, thereby enhancing their overall video experience.