I was a bit disappointed in the Super Bowl streaming last night, and from some preliminary results from our customers, it looks as if many others were as well. A sampling of customers looked at low participation: A DSL operator had less than .5% of their subscribers watching, and multiple MSOs had almost 2% participation – which is lower than I expected for the event. Not a big surprise, but Facebook and Twitter were also very active during the game time (although Twitter has reported that most of the activity was about the commercials and the halftime show and not the game!). There was a noticeable dip of about 33% in other forms of streaming video during the game (Netflix, YouTube, etc), as people stopped watching streaming movies and watched the game (although at Halftime YouTube spiked up). Other types of vide streaming picked up during the game, but dropped back to kickoff levels at the end of the game as even marginally interested parties checked in to see the exciting conclusion to the game. There was no real impact in Canada, and some spotty watching from around the world, but clearly this event was US-centric. Read more [+]
Steve Jobs once said, “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
There are three pillars to Intelligent Policy Enforcement: Awareness, Analysis, and Control. Solutions that lack any of these capabilities will limit the ability of an operator to deliver personalized services to their customers. The more they lack, the more limitations that will be imposed on the operator – whether those limits are scalability, performance, granularity, or even operational in nature.
Let’s be upfront about something: Personalized services are HARD. Read more [+]
Yesterday, the NFL announced that it would be streaming the Super Bowl live to iPads, Verizon mobile phones and the NBC/NFL websites. In my mind, this marks a significant moment in the annals of streaming video as the potential turning point in the transition from traditional delayed broadcast video to live streaming. Sure, there have been plenty of live streams across the Internet (and not just pirated streams of sports events!). In fact, the NFL streams games every week and the past two Olympics have been streamed online. The NFL claims that 20,000-30,000 viewers watch their regular Sunday night streams, compared to 21,000,000 viewers of the broadcast version. However, the Super Bowl was watched by 111,000,000 viewers last year. NBC has upped the ante by promising excusive content and analysis for the streaming version, which is likely to result in people having both the streaming and broadcast versions active in their household at the same time – the big consumer most likely will be the iPad version.
Why is this significant for the Internet?
1) The NFL and NBC have confidence in their ability to stream content to millions of simultaneous consumers around the world. Although the NFL is not a worldwide sport like soccer (football to the rest of the world!), people watch the Super Bowl worldwide. If this goes well, expect the World Cup final to get the same treatment in 2014. Read more [+]
The challenges of personalized charging or charging based on applications have generated a lot of discussion lately. The key challenge in any type of service like this is the proper setting of expectations with the customer. There have been a few examples to date of mobile operators attempting to offer prioritized services (mainly gaming) or “enablement” services (i.e., Pay $5 and we will let you use Skype on our mobile broadband.), but application or even site-based charging will require even more techniques. Many GGSNs in the past have offered limited zero-rating capabilities for ringtone downloads, system updates, etc., based on IP addresses or a small number of URLs. There are many cases of IPE systems being used for charging today; however, many of them are volume- or time-based charging to offload existing charging systems, or were installed for future application-based charging use cases.
On the other hand, “application-based” charging or even “site-based” charging in today’s Internet environment brings all new challenges to the table. The biggest challenge is that the user experience on a site is very different than it used to be. Read more [+]
I was reading an interview with George Dyson, and during the interview, he made a comment that really caught my attention. He was speaking of the volumes of data that many people have to deal with, and his comment was “Information is cheap, meaning is expensive”. The comment resonated for me, as it encapsulated the headline of a new product from Procera called PacketLogicTM Report Studio.
Two of the biggest challenges that network operators face is 1) information overload, and 2) lack of relevant information. There are plenty of Internet trends reports that can tell you what is happening on networks around the world, but NONE of them tell you what is really happening on your network. Most Intelligent Policy Enforcement solutions can generate many canned reports, and even place them on pretty web pages, but they are all statically configured templates and reports. Most network operators can tell you down to the byte how much traffic is on their network, but that information does not allow you to plan new service offerings. It can also mislead you into thinking that you need to add more capacity to your network, but it may be that the excess bandwidth is being taken up by applications that you should not spend money to enable. Read more [+]