MediaMelon Powers Real-Time OTT Analytics for Dacast (Legacy App)

Online video platform provider Dacast chooses MediaMelon’s SmartSight solution to provide actionable data insights to its customers

San Francisco, CA – March 19, 2019 – MediaMelon’s SmartSight analytics solution for over-the-top (OTT) video was selected by Dacast, the Streaming as a Service™ platform, to provide upgraded analytics capabilities about its live and VOD streaming solutions. By switching to the MediaMelon analytics solution, Dacast now provides its customers, which include Red Bull, ADP, and Nokia, the ability to dive deeper into their streaming infrastructure. Features include collecting real-time actionable data down to the session level, offering multi-channel alerts, providing content and subscriber insights, and configurable dashboards. Data can be easily viewed in real-time and saved for further analysis.

“After making the decision to replace our in-house developed analytics capabilities with a third-party solution, we made sure to explore the options very carefully,” said Stephane Roulland, CEO at Dacast.

“We were very impressed with MediaMelon’s fully featured solution and their ability to supply information in real-time, as this addressed a real challenge we were having with support of live sporting events. Until we implemented MediaMelon, we were reliant on log data being provided by our CDN partner to verify usage. The previous delay in time-sensitive information was unacceptable for us and our clients.” 

Ultra-Detailed Viewer Analytics Presented with an Easy-to-Read User Interface

 One of the most powerful features of the new Dacast video analytics dashboard is the ability to track viewership information in more detail than ever before, allowing broadcasters to gain an in-depth understanding of every session. Dacast’s previous solution offered limited analytics with a 2-hour delay. After an extensive search and trial period, the MediaMelon-based solution was deployed in 2018. Dacast rolled out a new user interface (UI) to present the ultra-detailed viewer MediaMelon-provided analytics. For the first time, Dacast and its clients can get detailed information for each stream such as:

• Data consumption by video or live channel, city, device type, domain, as well as overall data consumption over time
• Average time watching for each video or live channel, city, and device type
• Average number of concurrent playback sessions for any given time interval, video or live channel, city, and device type
• Plays and viewers both over time and per country
• Automated alerts based on performance or operational thresholds

Dacast’s Real-Time Video Analytics UI Powered by MediaMelon’s SmartSight Analytics

“Data is important. However, without applying human intelligence, data is just numbers on a screen,” continued Roulland. “Analytics for Dacast live streams provide data while live broadcasts are in progress. We are offering this to all of our clients, while many video platforms don’t include this feature at all, on any plan level.”

To empower their customers with actionable intelligence, Dacast decided to use SmartSight’s rich and flexible set of application program interfaces (APIs) to offer advanced services to their clients. With this level of detail, broadcasters are now able to analyze, manage, and substantially improve the performance of their streaming solution.

For those monitoring live channels currently broadcasting, the Dacast’s UI data feeds populate with four types of valuable information provided by SmartSight:

• Concurrent viewers display the average number of concurrent playback sessions over time
• New viewers help to track the rate at which new viewers are accessing the live stream in real-time
• Data consumed provides a total view of the amount of bandwidth that is used by all of your viewers around the world
• Data consumption by countries shows how much data is being used in all countries, and even cities, globally in real-time

“SmartSight gives video service providers like Dacast a clear picture of how OTT TV services are viewed, both in terms of actual usage and streaming performance,” said Kumar Subramanian, CEO of MediaMelon. “MediaMelon video analytics helps service providers find actionable data in the heap of collected streaming and audience metrics, and pinpoint issues that require immediate attention.”

About MediaMelon SmartSight Analytics

MediaMelon SmartSight is a dynamic real-time streaming video analytics solution that provides actionable monitoring and deep analysis of streaming performance and video usage for the marketing, operations, and engineering teams. Integrated with SmartPlayer QBR Streaming and SmartRoute Multi-CDN optimization from MediaMelon or as a stand-alone streaming video analytics service, SmartSight offers both immediate operational monitoring and deep business intelligence. SmartSight provides a dashboard view of customer engagement, quality of experience, ad analytics, per-subscriber and per-session real-time analytics, and alerts for streaming. Visit https://mediamelon.com/smartsight-analytics for more information.

About MediaMelon

MediaMelon smart streaming solutions optimize the delivery of online video, enabling content and service providers to improve performance, increase revenues, and enhance quality of experience. MediaMelon solutions include patented video quality enhancement technology, intelligent content routing, and analytics. Visit www.MediaMelon.com for more information.

MediaMelon and QBR are trademarks and registered trademarks of MediaMelon, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Dacast

Founded in 2008, Dacast has been offering video hosting and live streaming solutions to more than 300,000 professional broadcasters and organizations worldwide. In 2018, Dacast was recognized as one of the 50 most influential online video platforms and won the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Award for Best Small/Medium Business Video Platform. Recently in March 2019, Dacast acquired vzaar, one of the most trusted video hosting platforms for businesses, reinforcing its leading position in the OTT industry. Contact us for or more information.