Posts Tagged performance
What Is Video Performance Monitoring?
Posted by Internet Marketing Guru in Video Streaming on October 5th, 2010
Do I need an external monitoring service for my online videos? This is a tough call.
By now, enterprise level webmasters and many smaller corporate webmasters consider remote monitoring a necessity, an integral part of the team that keeps their business afloat. Monitoring allows the real team – the humans – to know when any one of a million factors ceases to function properly on a website, on the server, in the scripts, etc.
But what about videos? A regular website monitoring service is not necessarily going to pick up a video that is failing to load or loading slowly. Good news – especially if videos are a key means of reaching your target market or current customers; video streaming monitoring has arrived!
But with millions of videos filling the likes of YouTube, is it realistic to monitor them all? Of course not, just as it is not realistic to monitor the performance of every website and every blog. But video is becoming a more integrated feature of the Internet.
In June 2010, Beet.tv said, “The consumption of online video news and information clips in the U.S. has doubled over the past 12 months, to 565 million video views in May, up from 277 million last May, according to ComScore.”
So as people count more on videos, it is more important than ever that you can count on your videos. For instance:
- If your “product” is video-based, such as online training videos tips or online video education, you have no choice but to deliver constant on-demand videos. Failure is not an option. You can’t afford to have angry customers who can’t access the videos they paid for.
- There is often a huge reputation aspect to one’s marketing message, and if video is part of the message, then it is important that potential customers are exposed only to properly functioning videos. Think about it – would you trust your money to a company whose videos don’t appear to be functioning properly? Would you feel comfortable relying on them to deliver trouble-free products to you?
- If video is part of your instructions or training efforts that customers rely on to properly assemble or use your products, you don’t want a flood of returns from frustrated customers.
The good news is that as the Web evolves, so does monitoring. Remote video streaming monitoring is finally here, and it will become an increasingly important way for businesses to keep track of how they are doing and where potential technical issues might need to quickly be addressed.
Video stream monitoring checks video streaming services for performance and availability. The video monitoring provider itself works in a similar way to Windows Media Player. So if a stream can be played with Windows Media Player, then your video stream monitoring service can monitor the stream.
Video stream monitoring goes through the following four steps:
1. Connect to the server where the video is hosted.
2. Buffer the video.
3. Play the video (not really – nobody is watching, but it goes through the streaming motions)
4. Disconnect.
The video monitoring providermeasures several different factors, including:
- Connection time
- Frame Rate
- Buffering packages
- Buffering time
- Received packages
- Bytes per second
If any of these variables reports a substandard level, below whatever cut-off line the monitoring service looks for, an alert is sent to you. The first step to resolving a video streaming problem is to know it’s there — and to know exactly what is not working. Then you can easily check to see what the cause is – server, script, too much traffic, etc.
Not every website will need video monitoring, just as not every website is complex enough or crucial enough to need performance monitoring. But as this post on Microsoft’s Double Rainbow Guy shows, you never know when a video will take off and overload your servers. And the worst possible time for your video to stop functioning is when you have a flood of viewers.
If video is a key component of your online business, maybe it’s time you started monitoring it a little better.
