ALU's content monetization strategy: Sell video QoE data to content providers
Content monetization was identified as the top revenue priority worldwide for network operators in 2010 and 2011, according to a recent CIMI survey, Nolle said. More network providers this year also indicated that they believed a CDN would be part of their content monetization strategies, as compared with previous years, he said.
Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) wants to add another dimension to that content monetization strategy: online video analytics. Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, a strategic investment group within Bell Labs that operates independently of ALU, recently announced AppGlide, a managed service for analyzing video QoE on CDNs.
AppGlide gathers about a dozen QoE metrics for individual users from multiple points on the network; the service then cross-correlates and aggregates the data throughout a region to identify popular content, video performance indicators and the effectiveness of CDN traffic management.
Instead of monitoring traditional network conditions, such as latency and packet loss, AppGlide measures quality of experience using metrics that reflect what subscribers see, according to Buck Peterson, general manager of AppGlide at ALU Ventures.
Through network probes and software plug-ins in the content provider's media player, AppGlide gathers about a dozen video QoE metrics, including how many times a video buffers, the delay between when a subscriber selects a video and when it actually plays, and how many times adaptive streaming bounces around between different levels of quality. AppGlide databases, which reside in Amazon's cloud, can be used to cross correlate that data into various reports, Peterson said.
"The best examples we got from the service providers themselves. They asked, 'Can you help me understand if there's a correlation between viewing length and network performance?'" Peterson said. "Meaning, 'Did someone stop watching the video after 10 minutes because there was a bad quality of experience? Because if there is, we need to isolate that video and fix it.'"