By Anthony Magliocco

If you know something about broadcast advertising, you know the term “Make Good.” It simply means if your commercial did not air properly or not at all, you are due a “Make Good.” A Make Good could be fulfilled by the local station or the network. Make goods are provided in the same program or program of equal viewer or demographic value, However, what about ads on the Internet? If something goes wrong with your web ad, will you get an equivalent Make Good? Who is watching out for your advertising dollars?

Between the source and the viewer, there are many devices and layers. Errors can happen at any point in the chain. Those errors could affect the Quality Of the Experience (QOE) for the viewers. Errors could include loss of audio or video, closed caption missing, frozen picture, blocky video, green or black screen. If viewers are dropping out of your program, how will you tell why? Hardly anyone would imagine the program was well, boring, and people just tuned out. Maybe there was something wrong with the feed.

If you are responsible for live video streaming distribution, advertising dollars or any part of the food chain, you will want to understand if your viewers are getting the program and your commercials.

In the broadcast TV world, you could hire service companies to monitor the local affiliates. How does that work in the Internet world. The Internet is everywhere. The TV networks would find out if their feed died at the local station because people would call in. Whom will Internet viewers call? Simply put as your content moves out across the Internet, things can go very wrong.

A poor QOE might cause your viewers to give up on the stream, and even worse fines for not meeting the Regulatory Compliance requirements for Closed Captions are always a possibility. What are you doing to make sure your content is streamed properly to your viewers and that you are getting a proper return on your advertising dollars?

A new service that performs real-time analysis of live streams was recently launched by Venera Technologies (www.veneratech.com). The early results are impressive. If successful, this new tool could go a long way toward ensuring that advertisers get what they pay for.

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