SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIF. — Provider of streaming and podcast solutions StreamGuys has launched its second generation SGreports product, a log processing and content analysis toolkit for both live streams and podcasts.
Part of StreamGuys’ SaaS suite of analytics and monitoring services, the updated offering offers an enhanced user experience through improved data aggregation and presentation along with faster access to streaming analytics.
StreamGuys has initially made the updated product available to small to mid-sized customers 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 e.g. program streams and podcast episodes. In its previous iteration, users manually parsed data through SGreports’ expansive filter options to build reports. Although the process of exporting data was straightforward, the data aggregation process could become time-consuming as the number of sources of metrics grew.
“Broadcasters with varied streaming portfolios often have specific reporting needs that were not easily served by the previous iteration of SGreports,” said Robert Minnix, product manager of Humboldt County, California-headquartered StreamGuys. “SGreports now offers a more cohesive environment to aggregate data from different subsets to achieve a single view as opposed to managing data across many dashboards. The simple explanation is that users have a more consumable overview 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’ve now centralized all that data into a single pane of glass.”
As before, SGreports also allows users to flexibly drill down for more detail and customize their views for maximum efficiency. But SGreports now also offers a “snapper, more responsive user interface” that offers more visually distinctive metrics and at greater speed. It 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 different cities and countries, are now presented in ways that are simply more appealing to view and faster 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 enables SGreports to gather data more quickly, 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 process data in real time,” Minnix said. “No more waiting until tomorrow to access user traffic metrics as there is no more batch processing data across different intervals. The information is populated when viewers and listeners disconnect.”
SGreports’ advanced reporting capabilities now include improved user agent and device-level analytics based on the Open Podcast Analytics Working Group (OPAWG). Support for OPAWG – a cross-platform initiative to standardize the tracking and measurement of podcast downloads – strengthens IP and user agent blacklisting, bot identification and filtering to deliver higher quality podcast reporting through community-based specifications. SGreports also now integrates directly with StreamGuys’ flagship SGrecast podcast management platform and will soon support the SGrewind time-shifting service to help users spot trends in traffic and consumption of rewindable content.