Touchstream: Bringing Quality Media to Masses

Brenton Ough, CEO & Co-Founder

Touchstream has been a prominent player in the OTT availability and performance monitoring solutions landscape for several years. From concept to completion, the company specializes in designing and building systems which focus on the needs of the global industry. With offices in Melbourne, Australia and Barcelona, Spain, Touchstream is well positioned to provide OTT stream monitoring solutions to clients remotely from any location.

In this interview, Brenton Ough, CEO & Co-founder of Touchstream shares some insights about the organization’s OTT stream monitoring solutions, their unique value proposition, and their roadmap for the future.

What is your outlook on the current content delivery landscape and how does Touchstream contribute value to this industry?

Today, with social media at their fingertips, viewers are quick with feedback about the services being offered to them, including low tolerance for any service compromising on quality. More accurately, it’s not simply the quality of the service captivating viewers’ interest but the consistency of that quality. It is important to note certain providers are catering to some of the largest broadcasting markets in the world. Clearly specific factors such as the quality of the content, stream quality, availability, and performance are critical. Content providers are supporting an increased visibility approach, which includes the deployment of specific media monitoring tools. Here the front-runner in delivering this visibility is Touchstream’s media monitoring product StreamCAM which specializes in providing the CDNs and broadcasters with constant in-depth testing of their streaming content remotely from multiple locations around the world. From the outset as our product started gaining traction in the OTT space, we began to approach bigger providers who immediately recognized the potential of our solution and how it could provide an exceptional visibility unlike before, particularly from a CDN perspective.

Could you provide us with a brief overview on how the StreamCAM platform integrates with customers’ system and attributes to their benefit while helping them achieve desired output?

Touchstream’s platform empowers clients to facilitate an uninterrupted viewing experience for their customers. The platform thoroughly examines the customers’ stream to identify the issues within the network and reports it back to our customers with detailed and actionable information. This information helps both CDNs and our customers to collaborate on problems and fix them quickly. Touchstream customers configure the manifests, or the basic web URL, of the customer’s stream onto the StreamCAM system, which then tests it remotely from any given location. The stream is monitored every minute to check whether the stream information is consistent, all components are fully available and if they are performing well. Working with some of the major CDNs within the space, Touchstream shares its data with them in real-time while integrating with their network to provide the best streaming experience for everyone. We believe collaboration with cloud and technology partners is the best efficacy to rapidly resolve issues.

In the light of Touchstream’s collaborative stance, could you please provide a brief insight on Touchstream’s StreamE2E, and the integration and partnership dynamics offered by the platform?

Touchstream has created StreamE2E, an end-to-end integration module where Touchstream brings more partners into its ecosystem to build richer and more powerful data integrations from external data sources. The StreamE2E ingests the data on the viewership, the signal inflow, plus all touchpoints in the end-to-end workflow, integrating it all into one single view on Touchstream’s dashboard, StreamCAM.

We believe collaboration with cloud and technology partners is the best efficacy to rapidly resolve issues

Could you provide me with a success story of a client, where your stream monitoring solutions stood instrumental for their success?

Touchstream’s multi-CDN monitoring solution was configured to monitor the streaming of a high profile U.S. sporting event that was being viewed by millions throughout the country. The monitoring commenced two hours before the actual game began. By setting up the monitoring across the country, the multi-CDN mode immediately picked up an issue with one of the CDNs located in the Midwest early on. Immediately that specific CDN’s location was taken out of the mix. The outcome—the game started on time and streamed seamlessly without any hindrance. Owing to the active monitoring and dexterity of Touchstream, massive customer dissatisfaction was successfully prevented.

What does the future look like for Touchstream? Are there any new projects in the pipeline for 2019?

As quality today becomes the primary focus for a lot of broadcasters and content providers, Touchstream’s stature in the market has further solidified with our agile and customer-centric approach. We are planning to further improve the quality of the streaming provided by our customers by integrating with several big content providers and broadcasters. We also have plans to enhance the end-to-end functionality of Touchstream in the next 12 months with more emphasis on quality content.