The Business of Stream Metrics: Quantifying Quality

What’s Next?
With only one stream metric provider in the market, change could be on the horizon. In what amounts to a monopoly, Keynote could increase its rates for Streaming Perspective. Streaming service providers interviewed for this story don’t expect there to be a significant change in the fees they pay for metrics and say that they would consider dropping the service and building out their own network of agents rather than increasing their budget for outsourced measurements.

More likely is that a creative engineering and business team will see the new situation as a perfect opportunity to give Keynote some competition. Based on historical evidence, a new entrant in the stream metrics business will need significant capital resources to gain market share and in the end its return on investment will all depend on whether content owners and viewers are willing to pay a premium for superior video quality. Until the industry develops a better language for describing the video quality than the one we have today ("good enough" is commonly heard), I predict Keynote will be the only company speaking about streaming metrics.