At the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April, MediaMelon will be showcasing its content-aware over-the-top (OTT) streaming video platform. MediaMelon's cloud-based solution overlays on top of existing OTT platforms, bridging the gap between the headend system and each subscriber's media player. The platform is designed to support:
- Streaming - influencing the bitrates used by individual players to reduce the bandwidth operators need to deliver their streams, while simultaneously improving the perceived quality of the video delivered
- Analytics - delivering real-time quality of experience (QoE) and system performance data from each individual viewer's usage
- Multi-CDN - enabling the implementation of a unified multi-CDN architecture to provide network cost and availability management that can be manipulated on a media player-by-player basis
"MediaMelon believes in the future of Internet video. The company was established to help OTT operators to deliver the best possible quality of experience to their users in the most cost-effective ways possible," said Kumar Subramanian, CEO of MediaMelon. "By closing the loop between the OTT headend and client players, we are able to provide streaming, analytics, and robust content delivery that is optimized for each device type, each network type, and each individual user. By tuning streaming and data gathering on a user-by-user basis rather than a system-wide basis, we can help operators really optimize performance for each subscriber."
The three main components of MediaMelon's OTT streaming platform are:
- SmartPlay Streaming, which uses MediaMelon's patented QBR technology to improve the performance of traditional adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming, while remaining compliant with standard streaming protocols. SmartPlay is designed to allow each media player in an operator's network to become aware of the perceptual video quality of the streams being delivered - both live and on-demand - and use that information to decide the best bitrate to use. The system is intended to reduce both bandwidth use and the cost of delivering content, and to increase the visual quality of content delivered. SmartPlay resides between the encoding system and the players in the network to allow per-device and per-session stream optimization.
- SmartSight Analytics, which is a video analytics platform that uses perceptual video quality analysis to provide accurate QoE data to allow insights in to the user's actions and provide actionable business and operational analytics.
- SmartRoute Multi-CDN, which is designed to allow operators to combine two or more CDNs to maximize uptime and minimize cost. SmartRoute monitors CDN performance at the media player level, and each player in the network can receive the next data block from any of the CDNs to which it is attached. The MediaMelon solution is designed to enable players to switch mid-stream, as well as from packet-to-packet. The SmartRoute control system can be programmed with a variety of business rules, such as those that ensure CDN minimum bandwidth commitments are met. The system then guides individual players in the network to use the CDN that makes the most business and operational sense.