Continuing the series of our recent dashboard improvements, we decided to release some new metrics this time around. We used to keep them for internal monitoring only, but several requests to include these features in the dashboard led us to change our minds.

Bitrate, number of playback sessions, and playback duration are among the metrics being released for this update. Including a new section titled “Lab” (beta), that groups all of these new metrics, as well as upcoming releases, together.

Many more are still to come, ranging from monitoring long-term trends or new interesting KPIs such as throughputs, stability, or any other that may be relevant to customers. But we wanted to release these metrics beforehand, as we feel they are of current interest to our clients.

As always, your feedback is truly helpful, and if there are other valuable metrics that you would like to see, please let us know. 

1) Bitrate Related Metrics

The average bitrate, or how viewers are distributed among different bitrates, is a first-hand quality indicator. So we present both, as well as the CDN offload aggregated per bitrate.

2) Playback Sessions

It is particularly interesting for broadcasters to know how many playback sessions occurred to be able to characterize their audience, as well as the average duration of these sessions. Together with the number of viewers provides a better understanding of said behavior of the audience.

These metrics are also provided on a per-playlist basis, so you can see which playlists accumulate more sessions and retain the audience better.

3) Total Playback Duration

Compared to the total number of Terabytes moved, the total playback duration time is an interesting statistic to get a clearer sense of how much time people watched your content and even relate it with your business goals.

4) Some Extra Playlist Charts

As mentioned earlier, the “Lab” (beta) section of the dashboard is a place for experimentation, and the playlist signature is the most noteworthy experimental chart we have included.

It shows CDN offload vs. the number of viewers per playlist in a scatter-plot, where each point represents the aggregated data for one hour. Points that represent consecutive hours are joined together with lines to include a sense of sequence and time in the visualization.

This chart aims to give a notion of what CDN offload you might expect given a number of viewers.

All in all, we hope you get the most out of these series of updates and appreciate any feedback you may have, as we are always looking to improve our dashboard and the experience of our customers.