Keeping stride with consumer video consumption habits, Nielsen has launched a performance testing platform for mobile video that centers on benchmarks such as resolution, time-to-start and rebuffering.

The new test solution, which covers both mobile/cellular networks and WiFi, spans a wide range of carrier mobile networks as well as different mobile devices.

Nielsen has been testing mobile networks for about 17 years. Though it was originally focused on the performance of voice calls, the sector, of course, has evolved to center on high-speed connectivity for web applications and a surge in video consumption.

Nielsen’s Q1 2017 Total Audience Report found that monthly U.S. video consumption on smartphones rose 81.5% year-over-year – from 151 minutes in 2016 to 274 minutes in 2017.

Nielsen’s new mobile video performance offering aims to provide an “independent benchmark” in this area, explained Mike Greenawald, SVP of Nielsen Service Quality.

“This is where the industry is going,” he said. With respect to high-speed data, “It used to be that you wanted to own the home, but now you really want to own that connection to the consumer, from the content to the delivery.”

Looking beyond bits and bytes, Nielsen’s mobile video performance system tracks benchmarks that are important from the consumer perspective, centering on elements that are most critical to the consumer.

Video resolution, startup time, and rebuffering (the amount of time that video stalls during playback) “were the three elements that popped,” Greenawald said.

The new platform also keeps tabs on video success rate (the ability to launch and play a video in 60 seconds).

Nielsen’s new performance tracker leans on an HLS video player on smartphones that works in tandem with a cloud-based system that obtains the data and runs the tests. As part of its control methodology, the tests are conducted with the same video clip/file to create a like-for-like comparison.

Nielsen’s measurements are based on wireless usage and performance of a national panel of 70,000-plus U.S. users, factoring in a wide range of devices, locations and operators.

Starting next year, Nielsen will use that data to create industry-level data points and reports that highlight mobile video performance.

But it’s already issuing some info based on initial findings, finding that mobile operators delivered HD (720p or greater) quality video 69% of the time.

Based on 120,000 tests conducted from September to October 2017, consumers in Orlando, Portland and Seattle enjoyed the best video viewing experiences, while those in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Houston receive HD video less often than the national average.

Ahead of the 5G era and as more consumers use mobile networks to stay connected, these performance benchmarks will become “critical elements that will differentiate the service providers,” Greenawald said.

Viavi Solutions acquired Trilithic Inc. for $55 million in cash, “subject to working capital adjustments,” the company revealed in a 10-K filing.

In a deal that brought more consolidation to the test and measurement market, Viavi Solutions acquired Trilithic August 9, estimating then that Trilithic’s trailing 12-month revenue was in the mid-$20 million range.

RELATED: Viavi Buys Trilithic 

Viavi president and CEO Oleg Khaykin said then that the Trilitic product portfiolio “nicely compliments” Viavi’s and “enhances our ability to gain share outside of North America.

He added that the deal fits in well with Viavi’s strategy to drive the consolation of field instruments used for test and measurement.

In a deal that brings more consolidation to the test and measurement sector, Viavi Solutions acquired Trilithic Inc. on August 9.

Viavi revealed the deal this week as it released fiscal Q4 results, estimating that Trilithic’s trailing 12-month revenue was in the mid-$20 million range. Viavi expects the deal to be accretive in its current fiscal year. This deal comes about five months after Telestream acquired IneoQuest, and nearly a year after Telestream snapped up U.K.-based quality control firm Vidcheck. 

“Their portfolio nicely compliments Viavi’s products and enhances our ability to gain share outside of North America,” Oleg Khaykin, Viavi’s president and CEO, said of Trilithic Tuesday on the company’s earnings call.

He said the deal fits in well with Viavi’s strategy to drive the consolation of field instruments used for test and measurement.

Khaykin likened Viavi’s existing product line as “the bells and whistles” and “highly complex instruments that are used by network [technicians],  while Trilithic tended to focus on the home market and installers.

“So we had a hole in our portfolio in addressing the contractor space,” he said. “With Trilithic,  we are closing that gap and we are now going to go and take share in Latin America, Europe, and Asia…markets where we have not played before. And that's actually a very nice growing segment.”

He also acknowledged that Trilithic holds a much stronger position in the cable network infrastructure sector, and also has a produce line for noise leakage detection, which, he added, “is becoming a major problem for a lot of cable operators as they boost the speeds and they add more services.”

Viavi, Khaykin said, plans to integrate Trilithic into its existing products to create further differentiation.

For Q4, Viavi posted GAAP net revenue of $198.1 million, down from $224.1 million a year earlier, and net income of $12.1 million, or 5 cents per share.

Telestream, a maker of digital video tools and workflow solutions, said it has appointed Chris Drake as VP of business and corporate development.

Drake, who reports to Telestream CEO Dan Castles, joins the company from Comcast Technology Solutions, where he was VP of business development. He previously held exec roles at thePlatform, the online video publisher that’s now part of Comcast Technology Solutions, and RealNetworks.

RELATED: Comcast Launches New Tech Unit

Drake comes on board Telestream following its recent acquisitions of video monitoring and quality control firms Vidcheck and IneoQuest.

RELATED: Telestream Makes Play for IneoQuest

Expanding beyond its focus on cinemas and consumer electronics, THX Ltd. said it’s working with a mix of content creators, service providers and distributors on a new audio and video streaming quality certification program.

THX, the company founded by filmmaker George Lucas in 1983 and acquired last year by gaming hardware and software company Razer, claimed that the new program will help streaming companies “perfect their encoding and delivery methods” to ensure the highest possible quality of audio and visuals.

RELATED: THX Acquired by Razer

THX has tapped Conviva as its Quality of Experience (QoE) launch partner for the new streaming certification program. Conviva’s role will include the collection of data used to analyze streaming quality and will be combined with THX’s expertise in picture quality, encoding and compression techniques, and content packaging, they said.

“The goal is to establish a universal standard for quality in the streaming world that consumers can trust… just as we’ve done for cinema and consumer electronics,” THX CEO Ty Ahmad-Taylor said in a release.

Conviva’s customers include Crackle, ESPN, Sky, Scripps Networks Interactive, Turner, Disney Movies, BBC, CBS, DirecTV, Yahoo, Vevo, Verizon, Starz and Crunchyroll, among others.

Netflix recently encountered a  2.5 hour weekend outage (a weekend outage!), ultimately attributed to streaming issues. It was occurring just one day after the company made its new Marvel TV series Luke Cage available to stream, and loyal customers were less than pleased.

This outage, though unfortunate for Netflix, brings video quality to the forefront of industry conversation and importance, especially as we continue to see a massive shift from linear broadcast to over-the-top (OTT) streaming video. Even Google is hopping on the OTT bandwagon, with the rumored launch of its Unplugged service.

Arguably, one of the greatest challenges in this transition from linear broadcast to OTT is improving the consistency of the viewing experience, with current industry concerns around subscriber churn driving much of that conversation. This evolutionary challenge can be conquered -- providers just need to prioritize good quality or risk losing viewers to a competing service.

However, ensuring quality can be tough. There are a variety of analytics tools that take the “final inspection” approach, measuring the playback quality on the user device. Unfortunately, this approach merely identifies the defect at the same time the customer experiences it! The poor quality gets to the customer, and the best we can do with this “reactive” tool is identify apology opportunities. And some in the industry are bypassing even this basic level of monitoring, relying on social media to get their quality metrics.

Measuring the quality of the content and its preparation for downstream delivery is just as important as content distribution. Video providers must consider every part of their infrastructure, anticipate failures, and have tools and plans in place to detect and address them.

The multi-vendor streaming pipeline is complex; the first step is often identifying that there is a problem, and separating the known-good elements from the suspected ones. A proactive, end-to-end operational and behavioral correlation analytics architecture is the best insurance against failures occurring, and enables the fastest response when they do occur.

As indicated by the vast ecosystem of players in the SVOD industry, consumers now have access to hundreds of programs at their fingertips, distributed by channels and networks at a similar price from a variety of providers. Thus, quality is now of the utmost importance and a key facet of customer acquisition and retention.

End viewer quality is truly an end-to-end game, requiring strong defense (24/7/365 monitoring) and a focused offense that provides the real-time visibility required to know when there are quality issues and provide the information organizations need to address those issues in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Companies like Netflix and the future YouTube Unplugged offering from Google need to get this right to keep customers from abandoning subscriptions and pledging loyalty to the next best offering.

Kurt Michel is senior director of marketing at IneoQuest

Claiming to bring vision to the video cloud’s “blind spot,” a vet from the premium OTT world is heading up Wicket Labs, a Seattle-based startup that will help its partners keep close tabs on what, it says, are “mission-critical” APIs.

Without proper monitoring, frequent changes in those third-party APIs can cause outages and other impairments for premium video applications, including TV Everywhere offerings and various direct-to-consumer apps and services, explained Wicket Labs CEO and co-founder Marty Roberts, who most recently was co-CEO of thePlatform, the online video publishing company that Comcast acquired in 2006, and is also late of RealNetworks.

RELATED: Marty Roberts Leaves thePlatform

To address that issue, the startup has introduced the Wicket Scorecard, a service that keeps a close eye on ever-shifting third-party APIs that can impair an OTT service’s operations. He said API tracking can give partners a new level of visibility and enable them to more rapidly pinpoint API-related issues as they emerge.

Roberts said he and his team started to validate the idea by talking to several customers of thePlatform, noting that many have become increasingly reliant on cloud-based APIs but don’t’ have the personnel set up or their own monitoring systems to keep tabs on them, thus putting a heavier reliance on their vendors to handle many of those quality assurance aspects of their online video business.

Wicket Labs, he said, has built a core system that can call into these APIs and authenticate against them, or even validate them against a test environment prior to deployment.

The Wicket Scorecard uses a web and mobile user interface (UI) and alerts partners to the status of their Wickets based on three general categories: Good Wickets (shows a vendor’s API history and performance over time, including the number of times the API has entered a problem state); Notable Wickets (explain changes to an API that is not expected to cause an immediate or meaningful impact to the user experience); and Problem Wickets (details the issue and changes impacting the consumer experience and are presented for a timely escalation to the vendor) Problems in that latter category typically include outages, 500 or 503 errors, and “brown outs,” which can be attributed, for example, to an intermittent data error or a slow response time.  

Wicket Labs has not announced any individual partners, but Roberts said trials are underway and that the company’s initial group of targets includes premium video programmers, including broadcasters, cable operators or pure OTT providers.

“All of these companies have become increasingly dependent on cloud-based APIs, he said.

Starting today, Wicket Labs is offering free “friendly” summary account for up to three wickets before moving to a “Club” tier for five Wickets that costs $500 per month. A higher-end “League” tier is more variable in terms of the number of monitored Wickets are made available to the client.

Wicket Labs is currently privately funded, but could look to raise a formal “A” investment round next spring, Roberts said.

Other co-founders include VP of products Eric Knutson, formerly of RealNetworks and Rhapsody; and VP of software development Larry Hitchon, an exec who is late of Amazon, Front Desk, AppFog, and The Top Agent Network.

Eurofins Digital Testing, a provider of quality assurance and testing services, said it is adding more multiplatform TV and video smarts to its repertoire via the acquisition of Sweden-based Labatus.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal gives Eurofins access to a company that makes automated test products for a range of devices, including set-tops, smartphones, tablets, as well as apps.

Labatus, they noted, also supports the deployment of TiVo-powered platforms for MVPDs such as Com Hem, Sweden’s largest cable operator.

Eurofins, which will show off its handiwork at next month’s IBC show in Amsterdam, also announced the opening of a new test facility in Gdansk, Poland, that will provide a “near-shore testing facility” operators in Europe.

Eurofins recently joined a large group of companies licensing the Reference Design Kit (RDK), the preintegrated software stack for IP-capable video and broadband devices being managed by Comcast, Liberty Global and Charter Communications (via its recent acquisition of Time Warner Cable.)

Viavi Solutions has introduced a DOCSIS 3.1 field test platform that features the extended frequency ranges supported by the emerging multi-gigabit platform for HFC networks – 204 MHz upstream and 1.2 GHz downstream.

Viavi said the new capabilities is built on OneExpert CATV, a new platform that helps operators with HFC network upgrades. The vendor will be showing off its handiwork at ANGA Com in Cologne, Germany. 

The company said the platform embeds a D 3.1 modem, but also supports DOCSIS 3.0 with 32x8 channel bonding with software-upgradability for DOCSIS 3.1 testing.

Viavi’s enhanced D3.1 field testing capabilities appear as MSOs prepare to expand their tests and trials of the technology, which is designed to support up to 10 Gbps down and at least 1 Gbps upstream.  CableLabs is also working on a “full duplex” enhancement for D3.1 that will enable symmetrical speeds over HFC. Earlier Monday, Comcast announced it had kicked off a D3.1 consumer trial in Nashville, following up an earlier launch in Atlanta. 

However, Viavi said MSOs in Europe are already requiring vendors to provide DOCSIS 3.1 service test and 204 MHz/1.2GHz sweep in one instrument, and expects that feature to be adopted worldwide to other operators as they update their HFC networks.

“Wireline and wireless service providers worldwide are planning and building out networks to deliver Gigabit connectivity to subscribers, and Viavi is proud to offer comprehensive test, measurement and assurance platforms to support them," said Rob Flask, director of product line management at Viavi, said in a statement. "We have anticipated the European cable industry moving further ahead than the rest of the world in expanding their HFC networks, and have delivered a solution tailored to their needs."

Taking aim at a key, emerging tech area for the cable industry, Viavi Solutions has introduced a signal analysis meter that, it claims, is “fully compliant” with DOCSIS 3.1, a new platform that’s capable of delivering multi-gigabit speeds on HFC networks.

That product, which adds D3.1 capabilities to its OneExpert CATV Signal Analysis Meter, embeds a D3.1-based modem based on the Broadcom reference design, said Rob Flask, Viavi’s director of product line management. Notably, the first five modems to achieve CableLabs certification for DOCSIS 3.1 were based on Broadcom silicon, though products based on Intel Corp. chipsets are not too far behind.

Viavi's new test and measurement product, Flask explained, will enable MSOs to test D3.1 signals in the field as operators push the technology out of the lab, ramp up market trials and head toward commercial deployments. Among MSOs, Comcast has already identified the initial group of markets where it will deploy D3.1.

Viavi, which competes in the DOCSIS testing and measurement arena with companies such as Trilithic and VeEX, is entering the mix as operators begin to introduce a platform that introduces new technologies to the mix. D3.1 modems are hybrids that support DOCSIS 3.0 traffic, as well as new D3.1 signals based on OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) and a new, more bandwidth-efficient Forward Error Correction scheme called low density parity-check (LDPC). 

Viavi said it also offers a version of the product with DOCSIS 3.0 with 32x8 channel bonding that’s software-upgradable to D3.1.

Flask said MSO D3.1 activity started to pick up in the early part of the year. “Post CES, things have started to open up dramatically,” he said.

S3 Group said 12 pay TV operators are testing StormTest Warning Center, a platform that enables them to monitor and test new apps and services after they go live.

On the advice of operators, S3 developed this new DevOps capability to help “bridge the gap” between the end of initial testing and development in the lab to the actual launch of a new offering, John Maguire, S3’s chief strategy officer, said.

S3 Group announced its Warning Center trial update Thursday in tandem with the company’s second annual StormTest North American User Group in Philadelphia.

The need for a live-network testing system has come about as operators become more software-focused and shift from a test-and-launch to a launch-and-test mentality, while also moving away from monolithic systems and services to a model that supports the introduction of more granular “micro-services” that enhance the overall system. The trick is supporting and testing those without impacting all of the other pieces of the platform.

“They [pay TV operators] needed to continue to roll that testing into the live network,” while backing it with a cloud-based system that can run the analytics, he said. “This is a 24/7 activity…We’ve got a product platform that is particularly suited for this transition to continuous delivery.”

Warning Center and its cloud-based approach, S3 said, can be used to provide automated service validation, and perform remote troubleshooting and testing of elements such as audio or video quality, EPG rendering, channel change times, and VOD access times.

S3 Group isn’t identifying the dozen operators that are testing Warning Center, which was introduced at the IBC show last fall, but it’s a group that represents a range of distribution types, including IPTV, cable and terrestrial.  However, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Mediacom Communications and Canada’s Videotron are among the North American MSOs that are using S3’s StormTest products. Of that group, TWC is using StormTest tools for its TWC TV app.

S3 Group recently set up a new office in Philadelphia to support new and existing business in the region, and to accommodate cable sector growth. S3 is also managing the code base for the Reference Design Kit, the preintegrated software stack for hybrid QAM/IP and IP-only set-tops and video devices being managed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global.