Touchstream debuts live OTT stream content availability monitoring

Touchstream Debuts StreamCAM for Live OTT Stream Content Availability Monitoring at NAB Show NY

NEW YORK — Touchstream, the leading provider of video streaming content availability monitoring, today announces StreamCAM, Stream Content Availability Monitor, its comprehensive cloud-based service for live linear OTT streams.

OTT subscribers today have little patience for a poor Quality of Experience (QoE). In fact, according to SNL Kagan, 10% of viewers will abandon an OTT service because of a poor streaming experience which can represent a significant amount of lost revenue.

What’s at the heart of a poor QoE? In most cases it’s the availability or performance of a stream. In an adaptive bitrate (ABR) model, viewers are moved up and down bitrates depending upon available bandwidth and other factors. But what happens when there’s an issue with a specific stream in a multi-bitrate package? The viewers will experience buffering, failures or other problems when their player shifts to that bitrate. In order to provide the highest-level of QoE, service providers must ensure every bitrate in their streams is available and working at peak performance. And although many OTT providers employ player-side analytics to capture QoE issues, these solutions can only report on problems after the viewer has experienced one.

StreamCAM solves the challenge of ensuring stream availability by monitoring each bitrate 24/7/365 and providing OTT service providers a proactive approach to mitigating QoE issues. Scalable and cloud-based, StreamCAM can send alerts to operations personnel the instant an anomaly is detected, even when the stream isn’t being viewed. Provisioning can happen in just a few minutes, with nothing for the service provider to install or maintain.

“OTT providers need to be proactive in how they address content availability,” says Brenton Ough, CEO and Co-Founder. “They can’t wait until there are problems. By that time, it’s too late. Subscribers have churned. Viewers have abandoned. StreamCAM provides them the ability to monitor all of their bitrates and solve problems before users even access the content.”

StreamCAM also now features traceroute.

This new feature, available through the StreamCAM dashboard or data API, provides detailed information on the route a stream takes to end users and can help identify sub-optimal routing that is negatively impacting latency as well as the responsible party.

Touchstream’s StreamCAM platform will be on display at NAB Show NY, booth N1167.