SeaChange International is offering its on demand solutions customers access to Remote Managed Services, a “virtual workforce extension”, based on the remote monitoring and management utilities of SeaChange’s on-site Axiom on Demand content delivery platform.
Remote Managed Services were developed by SeaChange’s Professional Services division to enable operators to proactively prevent problems without adding overhead as increasing demand for VOD services puts pressure on their networks.
UPC Nederland’s video-on-demand platform received 47.5 million requests during 2009, a year-on-year increase of 45%, while over the last year monthly requests on Virgin Media have climbed from 53 million to 74 million.
According to SeaChange’s Tom Kracz, Vice President of Professional Services, a third of all issues reported to technical support could have been prevented by proactive, disciplined monitoring and maintenance. “Add to this situation the shortening of content release windows and operators’ increasingly creative tactics like retail ‘day-and-date’ releases that drive subscribers to use on-demand more often, and you can easily see the increased responsibility for technology providers to think and act ever more preemptively.”
SeaChange says its Remote Managed Services cover the vital maintenance tasks and analysis spanning the on-demand operations chain from movie and TV programme ingest to individual subscriber sessions.
Potential problems include faulty disk drives, burdened memory resources and third party equipment that fails to pass on requests.