SmartSight Technology

Uniquely Powerful Core Technology

The MediaMelon mission is to help optimize both the user experience and the business success of video content for global information and entertainment services. The core technologies that enable our systematic approach have been awarded more than 30 patents for video quality measurement and applications of advanced streaming intelligence.

iMOS Video Quality Measurement

MediaMelon’s patented iMOS and QBR Technology generates perceptual video quality information from the compressed streams it analyzes. Unlike similar technologies such as VMAF, it does not need to perform a before and after comparison of uncompressed and compressed content to generate the quality measurement. QBR calculates Mean Opinion Score information (iMOS™ data) through analysis of the encoded data streams or files.  Analysis of the media asset is very rapid and much faster than real-time playback so there is no additional latency added to existing workflows.  This makes QBR perfect for live streaming as as well as providing the capability to quickly process existing video file libraries. The video quality information produced enables the SmartSight Platform to provide insights into playback quality as well as automate the improvement of the quality of experience.

SmartSight Agent SDK

In order to provide intelligent insights, instrumentation data must be sourced in a way that ensures accurate, comprehensive, and objective visibility to video consumption events as seen by the viewer. This can only be accomplished through a close integration with video player logic – and this integration must be available across all platforms important to the service operator.

The SmartSight agent SDK is a robust code library that enables this detailed level of visibility of video player activity at the point of consumption. Close relationships with player partners ensures that the SDK is available as a standard integration, using well understood event types, across the vast majority of video platforms—and where a additional integration is required the MediaMelon team can complete this rapidly.

Integration of the SDK also provides a vehicle for QBR playback optimization by providing the player logic with additional "hint" information on quality and buffer usage on a session by session, network by network basis.

The availability of detailed, sophisticated session-level data vaults the acquisition approach beyond simple measurement of video bitrate and buffering etc. and enables both detailed exception management, and a fine-grain, per-device, and per content stream understanding of how to balance cost and quality in a way that is significant to the consumer.

Automated Anomaly Detection

Streaming businesses require real time anomaly detection and resolution to maintain viewer QoE. 
The environment is one where there are constant updates to content being streamed varies widely in genre, content type, target audience and video duration. Added to this, there are a host of other network and environmental variables in the streaming workflow that can influence quality.

Manual issue detection systems do not automatically adapt to your constantly changing service and operational context. Even rule based alerting of issues are not able to automatically adjust to the changes in seasonal patterns, user behavior, or any other changes in the key and contributing metrics.

SmartSight automated anomaly detection technology can accelerate issue detection and resolution in the face of this complexity and takes the hard work out of identifying issues. The system continuously monitors key quality of experience, engagement and business metrics to trigger alerts in real-time whenever anomalies are detected and uses machine learning to improve over time.

Operators can be notified of anomaly alerts through the SmartSight user interface, as well as interactively over Slack, Email or using webhooks for workflow automation.

Amazon AWS Foundations

MediaMelon has aligned its SmartSight implementation to leverage the best foundational cloud services technologies from the AWS environment and to use AWS best practices for effective cloud deployment. Alignment with the Amazon Partner Network (APN) assures application deployment and data management consistent with security and integrity best practices, thus eliminating associated business risks.

An important perspective on technical maturity and completeness is the AWS Well-Architected Framework that helps review and improve cloud implementations. Built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability—AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs.

You can be sure that working with MediaMelon brings a team with deep AWS configuration and deployment experience related to the core SmartSight implementation as well as custom integrations with other powerful AWS cloud service components & tools.

Hierarchical Admin Management

MediaMelon has ensured that SmartSight offers a rigorously architected and highly flexible account management architecture to manage access rights and enforce strict privacy and data integrity across its deployments. One of the specific benefits of this flexibility is the easy deployment of SmartSight as a streaming intelligence service component within end-to-end video publishing platforms that have a similar hierarchical account structure.

A basic way to describe this is that each instance of a SmartSight deployment is associated with one or more super admin accounts, which have the option of defining sets of distinct administrative account regimes. These administrative accounts have, in turn, their own rights to manage unlimited numbers of individual profiled user accounts. The administrative account level enables strict partitioning of data collection, data warehouse management, and analysis solutions as well as subdivision of solution usage metering.

The flexible, hierarchical account structure enables very granular control over SmartSight provisioning and use across solution integrator/OVP partner organizations. The whole administrative process for account spaces on the platform is managed through the SmartSight API, so that workflows for customer onboarding can be made seamless.

Leverage of existing authentication tool mechanisms makes for smooth enterprise integration. Individually administered SmartSight accounts and sub-accounts can straightforwardly be integrated with client directory services or SSO authentication tools with customer-determined access roles and privileges.