SmartLabs has released the latest version of its SmartCare quality monitoring tool, which is said to help operators and content providers understand audience behaviour and changes in viewing habits alongside verifying technical performance.

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SmartLabs: The new engine can highlight spikes of activity and report on customer drop-off

Based on its technical support offering that looks at the performance of streaming sessions, the SmartCare can analyse set-top box CPU and memory usage and OTT devices including mobiles, along with stream quality and buffering statistics. By collating this information and analysing it alongside channel and content offerings, the new engine can highlight spikes of activity and report on customer drop-off, helping to distinguish normal behaviour from abnormal and enabling operators to reduce customer churn and offer a better customer experience.

Oleg Sobol, R&D director at SmartLabs, said: “Using SmartCare, operators are able to see if there are issues with the system, in particular with OTT services, and identify how this might affect subscriber behaviour. Being able to collect and analyse this data means operators can proactively solve any technical issues before customers are even aware of them, reducing the calls to customer service.”

As well as gaining technical insights to help the service run more smoothly, the information can be used by commercial and marketing teams to identify which pieces of content are delivering. This can better assist with programming scheduling or could be used as a negotiation tool for paid-for content with suppliers.

Sobol added: “Users can create customised, feature-rich dashboards using drag and drop widgets with the ability to see the insights at a glance. Dashboards and reports can be easily tailored to highlight particular metrics. This makes it simple for the marketing team to see if a channel is not performing, or to view the actual numbers of subscribers watching a programme and for how long. Stream performance and glitches can be pulled together in one place for the tech team.

“In addition, being able to easily see this information in one screen is invaluable to CMOs, CTOs and COOs as well as anyone working in networking engineering. SmartCare is agnostic, so it can be the ‘health check on content provision network’ totally independent of other services.”