5 Ways to Prepare Your Video Service for the Holidays
The holiday season brings more than just festive cheer: it brings a significant spike in streaming viewership, as families gather to enjoy their favourite shows, movies, and seasonal specials. With viewers spending more time at home and streaming expectations at an all-time high, it's crucial to ensure video services are fully prepared. We’ve created a checklist to help streaming service providers deliver an exceptional viewing experience this peak season.
Test Your Holiday Catalog
It's not enough to just have great content – viewers need to be able to find content and play it, quickly and with minimum fuss. Recently, a major North American video service provider discovered that its own content was not appearing in default search results on their Android TV-based set-top boxes – instead redirecting viewers to YouTube. This impacted viewer experience, but also presented a missed opportunity for content the provider had already licensed. Beyond basic playback, verify that your holiday content works correctly across all viewing scenarios, testing closed captions, multiple audio tracks, and localised content variants. These details can make or break the viewing experience.
Real-Time Monitoring and Service Alerts
Teams are often thinner during the holiday period, making robust real-time monitoring even more critical. With more viewers at home and higher stakes for service quality, automated monitoring systems should serve as a first line of defense. These systems should provide instant visibility into service performance, enabling quick incident response times even with reduced staff. Furthermore, set up comprehensive alerts that can distinguish between isolated incidents and systemic issues, allowing for appropriate escalation paths.
Optimise Quality of Experience
Quality of experience encompasses start-up times, buffer rates, and resolution stability, not just streaming video quality. During peak viewing periods, it's crucial to dynamically balance these factors. Consider implementing adaptive bitrate (ABR) strategies that can gracefully lower quality instead of interrupting playback during network congestion. In particular, special attention needs to be paid to how services perform during high-profile events like popular sports games or premieres. Viewer tolerance for quality issues tends to be lower during special holiday programming.
Scale Infrastructure
Modern streaming infrastructure requires a sophisticated approach to scaling. Many providers employ a multi-faceted strategy combining in-house CDNs, commercial CDN providers, and open caching nodes provided by ISPs – with some providers even implementing AI-driven CDN selection to optimise delivery. However, just having these capabilities isn't enough – it needs to be verified that they're working as intended under real-world conditions. Monitoring CDN switching logic and validating overflow scenarios are working correctly is important. Keep a close eye on both the performance and cost metrics, as incorrect CDN utilization can impact quality and the bottom line. Test scaling strategies before the holiday rush to ensure smooth execution when it matters most!
Equip Customer Support
Support teams need tools and data to make quick, accurate decisions, not just scripts. When a viewer reports an issue, support staff must quickly determine whether it's an isolated incident or indicative of a broader problem. Empower support teams with tools that let them verify issues in real-world conditions. If a viewer in a specific region reports buffering, support should be able to check service performance on similar devices in that area. This capability not only speeds up resolution, but also helps prevent small issues from becoming major incidents during peak viewing periods.
Make the Most of the Season
Remember, the holiday season is when services can really shine – or suffer memorable failures. By thoroughly preparing these five areas, service providers will be better positioned to deliver the reliable, high-quality streaming experience viewers expect during their festive celebrations, making the holiday season that much merrier and enjoyable for all.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Witbe. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]