StreamGuys Launches Second-Generation SGreports Solution

StreamGuys has launched its second-generation SGreports solution, a robust log processing and content analytics toolset for live streams and podcasts.

The updated solution, part of StreamGuys' growing SaaS suite of analytics and monitoring services, offers a much-improved user experience through improved data aggregation and presentation, along with quicker access to streaming analytics. StreamGuys has initially made the updated solution available for small-to-mid sized clients, and will soon expand availability to larger enterprise accounts that require higher levels of customization.

SGreports helps broadcasters and media companies access metrics to understand how audiences interact with streaming content, and then leverage the resulting data to make intelligent business and programming decisions. The software presents visualizations on user dashboards to help them quickly filter and compare data on program streams and podcast episodes, for example. In its previous iteration, users manually parsed data through SGreports' expansive filter options to build reports. While the process of exporting data was straightforward, the data aggregation process could grow time consuming as the number of sources of metrics grew.

"Broadcasters with varied streaming portfolios often have specific reporting needs that weren’t easily services by the prior iteration of SGreports," said Robert Minnix, head of product, StreamGuys. "SGreports now offers a more cohesive environment to aggregate data from different subsets to achieve a singular view, as opposed to managing data across many dashboards. The simple explanation is that users have a more consumable view of everything in one place, which is especially useful for larger media networks and market-based streamers who have a lot of ground to cover. We have now centralized all this data to a single pane of glass."

As with before, SGreports also allows users to flexibly drill down for greater detail and customize their views for maximum efficiency. However, SGreports also now offers a "snappier, more responsive user interface" that offers more visually distinctive metrics and with greater speed. That includes more insightful charts and graphics versus columns of numerical information. "Some of the SGreports metrics that our users value most, such as geolocation information from users in difference cities and countries, are now presented in ways that are simply more appealing to view and quicker to digest."

On the quality-of-service side, StreamGuys has migrated SGreports to a Kappa software architecture that better supports real-time processing for analytics. This allows SGreports to aggregate data quicker, with event metrics often available within minutes of completion. "We've integrated the analytics stack into our infrastructure so that the host and client servers are processing data in real-time," said Minnix. "There is no more waiting until tomorrow to access metrics on user traffic, as there is no more batch processing data across different intervals. The information populates as viewers and listeners disconnect."

SGreports' advanced reporting capabilities now include enhanced user agent and device-level analysis based on the Open Podcast Analytics Working Group (OPAWG). Support for OPAWG – a cross-platform initiative to standardize podcast download tracking and measurement – bolsters IP and user agent blacklisting, bot identification, and filtering to provide higher-quality podcast reporting through community-based specifications. SGreports also now directly integrates with StreamGuys' flagship SGrecast podcast management platform and will soon support SGrewind time-shifting service to help users spot trends in traffic and consumption of rewindable content.

www.streamguys.com