Gomez Launches New Streaming Media Monitoring Service

This morning, Gomez launched a new streaming media monitoring service dubbed Active Streaming XF. For the past few months I have been beta testing the new service and adding my own streaming media URLs into the system from many of the major CDNs. While the service gives you results on all of the usual items you would expect like startup time, packet loss, etc.... it also allows you drill down in great detail on each individual test stream down to the individual IP address.

This is a great feature as it enables a customer to quickly and easily find out if the content delivery network they are using is truly serving content from a specific region of the world. While some CDNs say they serve the content from a local POP, this new Gomez service can tell you if it's really local delivery or not. Gomez has put a great deal of thought into the service, not only in terms of the technical details it provides but the ease of use you have in managing the data. All of the data that is presented has the ability to be managed simply by dragging a graph, data point or item in the tool bar. You don't have to ask the system to re-sort the data, you simply drag any aspect of the data to drill down or change the way the data is presented. It is extremely intuitive and is the best interface I have seen so far for any monitoring service.

Right now, many CDNs use Keynote's competiting monitoring service to validate their SLAs and it will be interesting to see if any of the CDNs being to use Gomez as well. From the testing I was able to do, this new Gomez service has really been thought out well and for some customers, is as cheap as a few hundred dollars a month.

Comments

[Niels]

so ... does it deal with live events where I'm more interested in a monitor that monitors the entire live event (for 100 minutes) rather than "just once every 3 minutes" like the keynote service ?

[Dan Rayburn]

Good question and I should have included that in the post. At this time, this product is not really geared towards measuring live streams.

[Marcel van Rijn]

Hi Dan,

would you be in the position to name a product which can monitor live streams, reporting this performance from different locations on the globe?

thanx

Marcel

[Dan Rayburn]

Hi Marcel, I don't know of a third party product that can do that today.

[Marcel van Rijn]

Hi Dan,

Looking at the experiece you have, I wondered whether you could let me know what tool to use in case you do want to monitor live streams, preferably with a performance indicator from locations all over the globe

thanx in advance?

Marcel

[Amnon Sherf]

Hi Dan & Marcel,

IVIVO launched (at the IBC) a beta of the LMP -
"Live-streaming Monitoring Platform".

For additional information abut the IVIVO Global unique Monitoring solutions Please contact: yzeira@ivivo.tv

Best Regards
Amnon

[Rajeev]

Dan & Marcel,

When deciding on the best approach to monitor a live streaming event, it is important that you have the flexibility in the monitoring process by varying the frequency of checks and the number of locations you monitor the video stream from. One other factor that would play into the decision making is the technology used to deliver the video.

Most recently Keynote Systems helped in monitoring one of the largest live events to be streamed around the world – The Beijing Olympics. CCTV.com of China used Keynote’s Streaming Perspective to monitor the flash based streams and Microsoft used Streaming Perspective to monitor over 2200 hours of streaming video on NBCOlympics.com on msn.

With a coverage from over 20+ cities (and expanding) around the world and support for various different video players (including a P2P), I am sure you will want to look at Keynote’s Streaming Perspective for your monitoring needs.
(http://www.keynote.com/products/voip_and_streaming/streaming_performance/streaming_perspective.html)

Rajeev Kutty
Product manager – Internet Test and Measurements
www.keynote.com