Sunday 2:30 p.m.–3 p.m.
Zen of Quality - How PBS measures QoS for digital viewers
Mike Howsden
- Audience level:
- Intermediate
- Category:
- Python Libraries
Description
It is extremely important to PBS that digital viewers have an awesome experience when viewing online videos. In this talk, we explain how PBS built a system to collect, analyze, and measure who's getting a good experience -- and who's not.
Abstract
PBS digital streams many videos online and this is not a trivial task. Once you build an online video streaming system, you have touched many elements that you can control. The remaining elements are things you cannot control: ISP bandwidth, user computers, Net Neutrality, and solar flares.
Thus, PBS has invested in creating a basic framework for collecting video streaming data, processing it, and visualizing it. This talk reviews the technologies involved including, but not limited to:
- Map Reduce
- Large database queries
- Lightweight data collection servers
- Video player instrumentation
- Data visualization tools
We created the framework to be open and modular so that various technologies can be slotted in to be customized to various environments.