NEW YORK—TAG Video Systems and Witbe have formed a strategic partnership to elevate video monitoring and quality assurance across the entire over-the-top content-delivery chain.
The companies will combine TAG’s advanced monitoring, including its Content Matching technology, and Witbe’s Virtual NOC offering automated video monitoring on real devices. The combination enables an end-to-end monitoring solution that covers the entire video delivery path, from the source feed to the actual viewer experience across multiple devices and locations, TAG said.
“This partnership marks another milestone in TAG’s mission to deliver multi-app monitoring at scale through our Realtime Media Platform,” TAG Chief Growth Officer Ziv Mor said. “With Witbe’s unique user-device perspective, we’re closing the loop on end-to-end visibility. Our customers now have critical insight all the way to the viewer’s device, allowing them to track virtually every quality aspect, including latency, across the entire network from source to screen, and proactively address the ongoing demand for a better and seamless viewer experience.”
As part of their collaboration, TAG and Witbe joined forces to conduct a case study during the Super Bowl, demonstrating the strengths and value proposition of their partnership. The case study showcased their combined technologies in action, assessing both the network and the content delivered at the end-user level, TAG said.
This included monitoring app performance, initial buffering time and content matching to verify the stream’s integrity. The study also measured latency between the various streaming platforms, which would not be possible without visibility into the end-user stream, the companies said.
Together, the companies conducted comprehensive monitoring of the game as it streamed across several traditional cable providers and OTT services, providing insights into how major platforms handled the delivery of a seamless viewing experience during a high-profile live event, the companies said.
“At Witbe, we are constantly pushing the boundaries of monitoring and automated testing, so our customers can accurately measure the true quality of experience they deliver to their viewers,” Witbe CEO Mathieu Planche said. “Partnering with TAG allows us to solve two critical challenges for our customers: accurately measuring the end-to-end latency and ensuring the correct content reaches end-user devices.
“With our combined expertise, we can now not only provide content providers and broadcasters with the ability to measure the true quality of their services on real test devices but also gain insights into how their streams perform across the network,” Planche continued.
The combined solution monitors and enables visualization of the entire content delivery workflow; measures and compares latency across different platforms; accesses KPIs such as initial buffering time, video quality, macro blocking and app performance; and ensures the right content is streamed across the delivery path all the way to end-user devices, according to the companies. It also verifies content switching to detect any expected or unexpected changes, they said.
For the game, the combination collected real-time data on latency differences between OTT and traditional broadcast platforms; streaming performance under peak traffic conditions; visual and audio quality across networks and devices; real-time error detection and troubleshooting; and matching.
Results of the monitoring session are available on the Witbe and TAG Video Systems websites.
