Guest post by Steve Christian

Pay-TV operators understand the necessity of a robust approach to service security to protect their businesses from piracy and revenue theft. Equally, they are coming to appreciate the potential of big data analytics to help them compete more successfully in a multi-screen world that is facing an array of new online players. Perhaps less widely appreciated is how these two dimensions of security and analytics are coming together to give service providers insights they would otherwise not obtain.

This is happening for two reasons. Firstly, much of the data feeding video analytics can be regarded as personal and sensitive, especially when collected directly from instrumentation of client devices – personalized services, including recommendation and targeting, are among the upsides of such data aggregation. Privacy measures are certainly required to ensure that such personal data is appropriately protected and only used for broader purposes once it has been effectively anonymized. The inference is that a comprehensive security approach can help enforce necessary privacy rules while also ensuring integrity of all data involved.

Secondly, video security systems themselves provide access to valuable information that would be difficult or impossible to obtain any other way. This follows from the unique position that security occupies within the delivery and display ecosystem – with touchpoints, including asset encoding and key delivery, to end devices for each subscriber. In other words, such systems have visibility into what is being watched on each device, with the ability to narrow the picture down to the unique individual when necessary.

Verimatrix has appreciated the potential of this synergy between security and analytics for some time. We have developed our Verspective™ Intelligence Center to help operators take advantage of this core capability through our innovative cloud-based engine that is designed specifically for pay-TV system deployment, management, monitoring and analytics. The objective is to optimize performance and reduce operational expenses across the whole video delivery infrastructure.

While we can aggregate and secure a large amount of extremely useful data, we also recognize that providing tools to visualize and interpret the data has not been our core area of expertise. For this reason, we are in the process of striking partnerships with key tool vendors in the analytics realm to deliver the desired insights to customers. By the same token, our analytics partners acknowledge that we can provide valuable data that, until this point, lacked visibility. For example Carol Hinnant, Senior Vice President of National Network Sales, Advanced Media and Information Division at Rentrak, a leading provider of consumer viewership information, pointed out that user authentication becomes absolutely critical when seeking to track consumers as they travel between screens.

Apart from user authentication we also have a unique vantage point in the content ecosystem due to the ability to make sense of encrypted data, since we alone have the ability to decrypt it. This is particularly valuable for our network monitoring partner, IneoQuest, which works to analyze data while in-transit across the network.

On the content side, we can also obtain information such as channel changes that operators have been able to obtain from set top box return path data but not so readily from IP connected devices. We can provide this information across multiscreen devices, which is highly valuable for operators as they strive to aggregate customer behavior across multiple viewing devices, with the focus not solely on primary TV.

Indeed, operators need to be capable of following their subscribers across the entire online trajectories in order to maximize total customer engagement, whether with an operator’s pay-TV service or a broadcaster’s content. Engagement equates to revenue from subscriptions, pay-per-view or advertising. Data is the raw material of analytics and gains value through integration across multiple sources to build a complete picture of the customer experience. As the specialist in revenue security, Verimatrix plays a crucial role in analytics, both in securing the analytics ecosystem and in sourcing some of the critical data.

This post originally appeared on the Verimatrix website. Click here to read the full article.

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