Over-the-top (OTT) video services are experiencing explosive global growth, driven by the increasing demand for video on demand, live online events, and streaming services. In this dynamic landscape, scalability, reliability, and exceptional user experience are paramount for success.
“The market has changed significantly in the last 4-5 years, with an emphasis on ROI and a clear path to profitability,” says Luke Gaydon, Head of Offering and Portfolio at Accedo. “End users have much higher expectations from a video service—and many more options to choose from. We have to help our customers navigate this new landscape, and that requires a different approach and a different set of capabilities,” emphasizes Luke. This heightened competition underscores the critical need for video service providers to not only scale their technology rapidly but also to maintain stringent uptime, proactively identify potential points of failure, and ensure a consistently high-quality viewing experience.
“Our customers are increasingly looking for business solutions, not just technology solutions. That requires us to have a higher degree of visibility of how our software and services are delivering against our customers’ key business outcomes. We need to be able to show the impact that we are having in helping our customers meet their KPIs,” explains Luke, highlighting the demand for comprehensive insights that translate directly to business outcomes.
The maintenance of high-quality streaming is intrinsically linked to positive business results. It directly influences every aspect of the end-customer journey, from initial discovery and trial to subscription, retention, and ultimately, their willingness to recommend the service. In the fiercely competitive and often volatile media and online entertainment sector, characterized by high customer churn rates, the ability to build and sustain reliable, highly regarded services is fundamental to achieving and maintaining business success.
Orchestrating infrastructure and technology vendors
The delivery of video streaming and digital entertainment services is often characterized by a complex ecosystem of technology vendors. This fragmentation across the value chain can divert media companies from their core business goals of delivering compelling entertainment and streaming services. Accedo steps in to orchestrate and manage this intricate web of providers, simplifying operations and ensuring seamless integration.
"What you realize is that every time you power up a new streaming platform, you end up managing a completely new set of potentially hundreds of vendors," explains Bleuenn le Goffic, VP Business Transformation at Accedo. "So if you look at the value chain of a media company, it's humongous in terms of technology from content production to distribution and monetization. At Accedo, we can't solve only one piece of that value chain puzzle: that's not what our clients need from us."
With a leading observability partner like New Relic, we have created a tailored offering for all relevant video service use cases.
Observability through Accedo Insights, powered by New Relic
“Without observability, nothing will work. There is no streaming company out there that would dare go live and promise a service to their end customers without monitoring the health of their service,” asserts Bleuenn, underscoring the fundamental role of comprehensive visibility in ensuring service reliability.
With Accedo Insights, Accedo empowers its customers with critical observability metrics across business operations, powered by New Relic. Clients gain the ability to monitor key metrics such as host process monitoring, host resource monitoring, transaction and load times, and connection buffering ratio. From here, clients can analyze buffering speeds and latency, track crash logs and load times, and gain deep insights into all relevant data points across the entire video streaming and online entertainment value chain. This marks a significant improvement from the days of relying on cumbersome logs, offering real-time, actionable data.
As a key component of this offering, Accedo is actively developing advanced features like social listening, building upon their prior expertise in end-customer sentiment analysis. This upcoming functionality will leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze customer feedback from various social media channels and app stores, enabling them to proactively address user experience issues based on customer sentiment. This integration of observability data, detailing how customers are experiencing the content, with direct feedback on their perceptions and opinions, provides a holistic view of the end-user experience and facilitates resolving issues before they impact end-users.
A powerful testament to Accedo Insights and New Relic's effectiveness comes from an Accedo customer who achieved a 64-fold performance improvement after Accedo utilized the platform to pinpoint and resolve a critical system bottleneck. This significant improvement underscores the profound impact of data-driven observability on service delivery.
A strong observability platform means being able to find and fix problems before your users start talking about them on Twitter.
Proactive problem solving in high-stake environments
Accedo is strategically shifting towards an AgileOps model, recognizing that comprehensive testing in pre-production environments cannot always replicate the complexities and nuances of live production. Real-time observability, powered by New Relic, provides Accedo and their clients with the crucial ability to continuously monitor and respond to changes and issues as they occur in the live environment. "You can prepare as much as you want, but there will be moments where you will have to react in production and learn from that," notes Bleuenn, highlighting the necessity of real-time insights for effective incident management and continuous improvement.
During previous peak events like the World Cup, Accedo leveraged New Relic to proactively address potential issues for their clients. "Using New Relic, we helped our clients identify where the bottlenecks were, what was causing them, and which vendors needed to be involved in addressing the issues," recalls Steven Kopec, Head of Service Management. In one instance, Accedo’s DevOps team swiftly identified a critical bottleneck as a component within the content distribution network, preventing widespread user impact.
Accedo Insights enables teams to rigorously test their infrastructure's capacity to meet anticipated demand in advance, embedding proactive observability practices into their agile operations.
Observability metrics as business KPIs
Accedo is fostering a more collaborative business model with its clients, shifting the focus of discussions towards data-driven insights with the end-customer experience at the forefront. Observability metrics, such as service availability and performance, are now being strategically paired with measures of operational efficiency and directly linked to user experience scores. This integrated approach provides a comprehensive, whole-of-business understanding of the intricate processes behind the scenes and their direct impact on the end customer.
"We want to help our clients achieve their business goals and KPIs and contribute to their success," says Bleuenn. "What makes Accedo Insights so special is that it helps us tangibly articulate what makes an impact for our clients."
Bleuenn further explains that this focus on tangible business outcomes is driving a positive evolution within the industry towards a more value-centric model. "We become a business partner to our media customers, not just an expert, not just a solution provider." Through the deep insights provided by New Relic and Accedo Insights, Accedo is increasingly supporting its clients across various critical business functions, including analytics, marketing, customer support and care, and every other facet of their operations.
By leveraging New Relic's intuitive dashboards and comprehensive reporting interfaces, Accedo can deepen their engagement with clients, providing them with clear, actionable insights that enable them to effectively track and continuously improve their end-customer experiences, ultimately driving business growth and customer loyalty in the competitive video streaming market.
