NETSCOUT > Case Studies > Maximize Premium Video on Demand Revenues

Maximize Premium Video on Demand Revenues

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

nGeniusONE® Service Assurance

Tech Stack

Video on Demand (VoD) system
Movie poster server

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Revenue Growth

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Remote Asset Management

Services

System Integration
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

The customer in this case study is a Tier 1 North American multiple system operator (MSO). This MSO offers over 30,000 Video on Demand (VoD) titles each month, with the most valuable being the pay titles, especially new releases. These new releases can earn several million dollars in just the first three days. The MSO is committed to ensuring the best possible experience for its customers and is always looking for ways to improve its services. However, they recently faced a challenge when an error occurred with the movie poster server that delivers information to the set-top box, causing subscribers to select a preferred title and receive something else.

The Challenge

The customer, a Tier 1 North American multiple system operator (MSO), offers over 30,000 Video on Demand (VoD) titles each month, with the most valuable being the pay titles, especially new releases. However, an error occurred with the movie poster server that delivers information to the set-top box. Subscribers would select a preferred title and receive something else, causing them to abandon the movie within the first few minutes of the rental. The MSO lacked direct visibility into the VoD experience from a subscriber’s point-of-view and wanted to understand why so many VoD views were abandoned within the first few minutes of purchase.

The Solution

To gain an end-to-end view of its VoD services, the MSO deployed the nGeniusONE® Service Assurance solution. This solution provides real-time VoD performance reporting and proactive alarming capabilities. After a recent load of new releases into the VoD system, the MSO received alerts from nGeniusONE about an abnormal increase in short duration views. With nearly 40% of VoD viewing expected within the first three days of a title’s release, the operations team had to act quickly to take advantage of the uptake window. Within a few short hours, the nGeniusONE solution enabled technicians to discover a skipped entry in the movie poster display database as the cause of the short duration views and abandoned content.

Operational Impact

The problem was caught quickly, saving the MSO from lost revenue for unwatched/mismatched content.
The MSO was able to rule out content delivery network (CDN) congestion, leading them to take a closer look at the servers involved in the release process.
The proactive alarming capabilities of the nGeniusONE solution alerted the MSO of the library issue, long before the first trouble ticket.
Post-billing refund requests were curtailed with a swift database correction that restored video-to-poster mapping.

Quantitative Benefit