Recently, many media platforms have allowed you to quickly and easily access video and audio files. After the Covid-19 pandemic, their number has significantly increased, so if in 2019 this market was 121.6 billion dollars, then by 2027, it could reach 1039 billion. Today, the competition in this industry is enormous, so if you want to work in this market, you should provide high-quality services. OTT testing allows you to identify the slightest errors and fix them in time.

What technologies affect OTT performance?

Many people think that content is the main thing in the platform, but practice shows that this is not entirely true. Of course, the quality and variety of content are of great importance. However, 72% of users refuse a paid subscription if they are not satisfied with the quality of the platform itself. Quality control (QC) and performance testing experts should evaluate content storage management, transcoding platforms, and measurement and control systems to meet performance requirements. You must be sure that your streaming platform is working completely correctly and when paired with services of OTT testing with TestFort, you will be able to keep your platform functioning properly in accordance with the required standards. Otherwise, you will not be able to hope that you will make a profit and what is even worse – you will lose paying customers.

A large number of factors influence the quality of the services provided. Each of these systems must be monitored and managed to provide the optimum viewing experience for customers.

Edge computing and CDN

Edge computing maximizes CDN performance by moving computing power closer to the end device. The first layer of logic links requests to APIs in the service architecture and provides an abstraction layer for middle-tier services.

It allows you to ensure that the content hashing is correct.

Load balancing

To optimize data traffic, load balancing restricts data flow by denying incoming requests and redirecting them to maintain throughput. So, if you can configure load balancing, your platform will work correctly.

Microservices

Your platform combines hundreds of independent microservices, each of which implements a specific business idea. If any of them work incorrectly, this can negatively affect the user experience.

Content encoding and delivery

Each media file is divided into fragments sent at different bit rates. So, if the data transfer is carried out incorrectly, your users will not be able to enjoy the high quality of your content.

Data pipelines

The data pipeline allows cloud storage to process millions of view and user interface events every second. Cloud storage will also fail badly if this data pipeline does not work correctly.

So, quality control should be a priority. So, testing the quality of OTT service is necessary not only in the process of software development but also at the operational stage. It is because in the work process, failures can occur, and the load level increases.

How to approach OTT QC testing?

Because media platforms have a very complex architecture, it is necessary to use both automated and manual testing. So, the basics of web testing say that the interface should be better tested using manual testing. Unfortunately, there are currently no high-quality automatic tools that can test the user experience and understand how convenient it will be for potential customers to use your platform.

As for the internal filling, it is better to use automatic testing here. It will be able to check the following:

• Productivity;
• Functionality;
• Safety;
• Compatibility with different platforms;
• Load and more.

It is worth saying that the possibilities of OTT testing are constantly improving as the requirements for a good product are growing. Media platforms and other providers of such services continue to invest money, time, and effort in expanding and improving content. Still, they cannot monetize this content without a reliable high-performance infrastructure that ensures the quality of content to attract and retain users.

In the testing process, it is also necessary to pay great attention to the speed of content playback. Nobody likes to wait, so you must ensure your customers don’t wait too long for content to load. Also, you must be sure that video and audio files will play without delay. It is frustrating when the video is interrupted at the most exciting place.

Particular attention should be paid to the choice of a tester company. This should have experience with such platforms and enough automatic tools to catch even the most minor errors so that you can fix them.

Conclusion

Developing a media streaming platform is a rather complicated process, so it is almost impossible to avoid mistakes. Moreover, if these errors are corrected in time, then no problems will arise. It’s a good solution if you want to release a high-quality product into the world that your users will like and bring real income.