Latest News and Events
Sep, 2010Mobixell?s New Mobile Users Survey Reveals Mobile Video Optimization is Perceived as a User Experience Enhancer.
Aug 17, 2010
Mobixell the leader in Rich-Media Data Solutions awarded as an AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Company
May 27, 2010
Mobixell Rich Media Mobile Internet Webinar
Mobixell?s RICH MEDIA MOBILE INTERNET WEBINAR deals with the economics of mobile data. The webinar is targeted at mobile operators and mobile industry people interested in the current challenges of mobile data management ? specifically rich data such as video ? and what is the right approach to handle these challenges.
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Welcome to Mobixell?s Mobile BroadTalk Newsletter
Amir Aharoni, Mobixell CEO & Co-founder
We are also pleased to announce our recently added blog named: Mobile BroadTalk blog in which new concepts ideas and discussions are posted. We invite you to browse and comment through these postings here.
I hope you will find this newsletter informative and useful.
Sincerely Yours,
Amir
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
1. Interesting Results from a New Mobile Users Survey
Most users are frustrated by their mobile video experience, and expect their videos optimized to improve their viewing experience. Mobixell?s New Mobile Users Survey reveals that Mobile Video Optimization is perceived as a user experience enhancer (Keep Reading...)
2. Mobixell Rich Media Mobile Internet Webinar Summary
Mobixell's recent Webinar dealt with the economics of mobile data. The Webinar was targeted at mobile operators and mobile industry people interested in the current challenges of mobile data management, specifically Rich Data such as video and what is the right approach to handle these challenges. (Keep Reading...)
3. Meeting the US Industry Analysts - Trip Log
Mobixell's marketing executive Noam Green initiated an analysts tour in the US where he had a series of meetings with leading North American analysts including IDC, Gartner, Yankee Group, ABI, Forrester, Heavy Reading, and OVUM. The goal of the tour was to discuss trends and ideas related to the mobile data explosion, in-network traffic management optimization, and video optimization. It was the ideal opportunity to introduce analysts to Mobixell's views and technologies, and validate some of our assumptions. (Keep Reading...)
4. Mobixell?s Seamless Access to Reduce H/W Footprint and Enable
70% Video Traffic Reduction with 10% of the H/W
Mobixell's upcoming Seamless Access version will enable mobile operators to manage their surging Internet traffic while still maintaining a cost efficient solution. Using innovative techniques, Mobixell's solution enables reducing the solution's hardware footprint, while maintaining network optimization quality. (Keep Reading...)
5. About Mobixell?s Seamless Access Solution
The Mobixell Seamless Access solution is an intelligent converged mobile data traffic management solution designed to support next generation mobile Internet and mobile broadband services that enable mobile operators to offer innovative, flexible, and sophisticated services within the converged mobile market environment (Keep Reading...)
6. Questions and Answers: An Iinterview with Yehuda Elmaliach,
Mobixell Chief Technology Officer
What are the challenges mobile operators face today, and what?s ?the next thing? operators should be looking into? (Keep Reading...)
7. Mobile Internet Data Trends
Mobixell has analyzed some of the anonymous data gathered by its Seamless Access Platform to provide further insights into user behavior (Keep Reading...)
Interesting Results from a New Mobile Users Survey
A UK survey commissioned by Mobixell shows that 96% of the users are frustrated with the mobile video experience and up to 71% are discouraged by non-continuous video play and the long time it takes a video to begin playing. Continuous and smooth video playing is one of user?s highest indicators of their network quality ? and subsequently of their perception of the operator?s network efficiency. The mobile data explosion, significantly fuelled by video services, highly affects subscribers? user experience when watching video on mobile phones and laptops utilizing air-cards for Internet access. In order to cope, mobile operators can invest in a network build-up. However, this approach is costly.
Mobixell Seamless Access Video Optimization module empowers mobile operators to offer a superb video experience while avoiding the expensive cost of network build-up. In this manner, the y can achieve the perfect balance between user experience and cost reduction. In a generation where nothing less than 'instant gratification' is acceptable, mobile users do not have either the time or patience to wait for full video files to be downloaded or watched. Mobixell's survey reveals that the younger the users questioned, the more demanding they are of speed and user experience. The results show that over 69% of users in the younger age groups (16-24) prefer video to be optimized. In fact, Mobixell's traffic statistics also show that more than 50% of the mobile users watch approximately only half of the duration of YouTube video clips, which is probably fuelled by the instantaneous experience young adults have been accustomed to. Mobile operators are often blamed for the latency, although the problem does not always reside in the network, they can often be linked to video size or available bandwidth.
Back to Top Mobixell's Rich Mobile Internet Webinar
Mobixell held a Webinar titled Rich Media Mobile Internet to discuss latest trends and insights in the areas of mobile data explosion, video optimization, and operator smart pipe data strategy. Speakers in the Webinar, held on the 27th of May, included analyst Declan Lonergan, Vice President Consumer Research at Yankee Group, who stated that operators need clear positioning in a crowded mobile broadband (access) market. He also commented that operators should keep searching for the Holy Grail: new pricing for new market realities. Wolfgang Weber, Vice President of Mobile Services in Cisco, spoke about monetizing the mobile Internet and presented a formula for profitability of an operator (monetization divided by optimization).John Sims, a Mobixell board member and, former CEO of 724 Solutions (acquired by Mobixell in 2010), stressed the importance of creating the right architecture to support the management and monetization of the traffic, and the significance of optimizing video traffic in a smart way which will ensure excellent user experience. The Webinar was moderated by Avichai Levy, Mobixell's former Executive VP of Marketing, who led a discussion and a Q&A session based on questions from the audience. With over 100 participants, the Webinar generated enormous interest and led to further information requests. Back to Top
Meeting the US Industry Analysts
Mobixell has initiated an analyst tour in the US where Mobixell,s marketing executive Noam Green had a series of meetings with leading analysts in North America, including IDC, Gartner, Yankee Group, ABI, Forrester, Heavy Reading, and OVUM. The goal of the tour was to discuss trends and ideas concerning the mobile data explosion, in-network traffic management optimization and video optimization. It was the ideal opportunity to present Mobixell's views and technologies to the analysts, and validate some of our market assumptions. In general, all of the analysts agreed that the management of the mobile data explosion is a critical issue for operators. Almost all of the analysts are very skeptical as to the 'smart pipe' approach through new premium services, meaning they don't believe that the operators will be able to offer new premium services on top of the traffic, and they don't even believe that the operators will be able to monetize on information they provide third parties. What they DO believe, is that the operator's power lies in their ability to provide differentiated plans, differentiated pricing, and packages. Some ideas that were discussed: Class of Service (CoS) seems to be an interesting factor of how MNOs can monetize this smart pipe initiative per application. Video Optimization does not have to be only about reducing the throughput, it should also be about optimizing the user experience (according to CoS). External applications integrating with the MNOs for CoS and other billing related services, Having the MNOs monetize traffic management rather than creating new services. Applications may need to have their data 'colored' in such a way that it will not be counted as 'normal' data (the application may include a data package as part of subscription). This could also be used to 'color' advertising data in order to differentiate it from the 'positive' data users pay for. The analysts were impressed by Mobixell's solutions and the way they enable the operator to be more flexible and to provide the differentiated class of service and differentiated pricing packages. Back to TopMobixell's Seamless Access version to reduce hardware footprint to enable 70% video traffic reduction with 10% of the hardware
It is widely accepted, that video is the major consumer of bandwidth in mobile data networks and as a result operators and vendors are looking at techniques to manage video traffic in mobile networks. There are two main techniques in managing video: 1) just-in-time delivery, where the video is delivered at approximately the rate of play, and 2) optimizing videos to reduce their size. Just-in-time delivery is a lossless form of optimization and hence has no impact on video quality. Reducing the size of a video is a lossy form of optimization and as such it is important to ensure that there is negligible impact on video quality and user experience. Unlike just-in-time delivery, video bit-rate reduction is a resource intensive operation if a nearly unnoticeable level of quality reduction is to be achieved. Some vendors make the decision to sacrifice quality to minimize resources, but Mobixell passionately believes that maintaining quality is mandatory if video optimization is to be accepted. To maintain quality while minimizing the hardware footprint, Seamless Access targets video bit-rate reduction on popular videos that are played multiple times. This allows the resources consumed to reduce the video bit-rate to be amortized over multiple playbacks and therefore optimize the cost/benefit of the bit-rate reduction and allow techniques to maximize quality to be used. Analysis shows that more than half of the delivered video volume is accounted for by only 15% of the videos, as these are played multiple times. A combination of just-in-time delivery of all video content and targeting the multi-play videos for bit-rate reduction provides 70% the savings, when compared to reducing the bit rate of all videos, but requiring only 10% of the hardware. Back to TopAbout Mobixell's Seamless Access Solution
InnovationThe Mobixell Seamless Access solution is an intelligent converged mobile data traffic management solution designed to support next generation mobile Internet and mobile broadband services enabling mobile operators to offer innovative, flexible, and sophisticated services within the converged mobile market environment.
Functionality
Mobixell's Seamless Access is built with a flexible and modular architecture, allowing mobile operators to quickly scale and build new services across all types of wireless access networks and devices, while providing carrier-grade reliability, scalability, and extensibility. Monetization Seamless access provides optimized CapEx/OpEx efficiency for mobile operators by reducing the cost of new service deployment and support, leveraging common off the shelf hardware. It also provides intelligent transparent media conversion to match the capabilities of the receiving device. Seamless access has future-proof expandability to IMS and other IP-based mobile data networks, and backwards compatibility with current mobile operator's network infrastructures. Mobixell?s Seamless Access acts as a Policy Charging Rules Function (PCRF) for other network elements, enabling enforcement to be applied at the most appropriate point in the network.
Click here to download the Mobixell Seamless Access Brochure
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Questions and Answers: An Interview with Yehuda Elmaliach, Mobixell Chief Technology Officer
Q: What would you say are the most challenging issues in data and video optimization?With Video dominating mobile data traffic, optimizing this traffic becomes a significant challenge. Video handling introduces 2 main complexities: Retaining user experience, and the CPU intensive processing required to manipulate video. Retaining user experience when manipulating video is especially difficult since users are getting more accustomed to watching Internet video on large screen TVs and on high quality devices. With HD content popularity rising, user's sensitivity to quality increases. Video manipulation requires significantly higher computing power (by an order of magnitude) than other traffic manipulation. In order to handle these challenges, a particularly strong video expertise is required., If it is not done right, blockiness, staggering, blurriness, and other degradation will result in poor user experience.
Q: How does Mobixell address these challenges ?
Mobixell addresses these challenges with a 2-fold strategy :
1. Using Mobixell's unique advanced compressed domain transcoding algorithm
2. Optimizing videos on congested cells to significantly reduce the hardware (H/W) footprint
For over a decade now, Mobixell has been perfecting its trancoding algorithms to produce both superior quality as well as a minimal hardware (H/W) footprint. Using this unique advanced compressed domain transcoding algorithm (that uses one of Mobixell's granted patents to very efficiently trancode video without fully decoding and encoding it), the hardware (H/W) footprint required is reduced by a significant order of magnitude.
Mobixell has learned from experience, that brute force video optimization is sometimes counterproductive. Optimization should be employed only to streams that are in congested cells/areas. Mobixell has developed an algorithm which detects cell congestion in real time, and then decides if videos in this cell should be optimized. According to the VF group interim management statement (Feb. 2010), only 7% of cells are above 90% capacity during a busy hour. Optimizing videos on congested cells significantly reduces the H/W footprint.
Q: What would you say is to be the next thing mobile operators will be looking into for data monetization?
With the phasing out of flat rate plans, we see operators looking for additional ways to offer advanced billing schemes which are service oriented rather than based on pure volume usage. We believe that operators will seek to offer flexible, personalized smart charging schemes such as billing by video's watched time, HD vs. SD, combined service and volume offering (e.g. ebook data download time will be included in the ebook price), and others. On the technical front, due to the data explosion, we see operators looking at different traffic offloading techniques such as Wifi, femtocell and such, but there is also a clear trend to optimize the backhaul expenditure by offloading functionality to the edge of the network (e.g: into RNC). As an example, moving more service oriented functionalities such as video optimization to the edge of the network, seems to be an interesting concept that operators are exploring. Back to Top
Mobile Internet Data Trends
Mobixell has analyzed some of the anonymous data gathered by its Seamless Access Platform to provide further insight into user's behavior:In EMEA video content is
- Between 20-30% of total volume (Laptops still account for more than 2/3rds of HTTP volume)
- Between 30-60% of HTTP volume (but is less than 0.2% of the HTTP requests)
- Streaming video (e.g. RTMP, RTSP etc) is normally < 10% of video volume. In some markets it can be very small, but in others the popular portals use RTMP.
Source: Mobixell platform collected statistics (Tier 1 EMEA operator)
HTTP based video by portal
- By request
- YouTube can account for up to 67% of all video requests.
- After YouTube, there are adult entertainment sites that account for another 19% of requests, common sites are
- pornhub.com
- xvideos.com
- redtube.com
- youporn.com
- o Different countries have country specific sites but the pattern of YouTube domination followed by 4 or 5 adult sites constituting about 85%+ of requests is consistent between countries (For example, in the UK: BBC)
- By volume
- YouTube accounts for 45-50% of the video volume.
- YouTube plus the 4/5 top adult sites account for 75-80% of the volume
- Distribution by video content type
- FLV video is approximately 60% of video file formats
- MP4 is approximately 30% of video file formats
- Average download time of video is 54% of the play time of the video.
- This means that normally users abort their video downloads and view (on average) just over half the video.
- Some stats on YouTube
- 30% of YouTube videos are played more than once
- On average, a video that is played more than once is played 4.5 times.
- Average YouTube Video size is 5.15Mbytes
- After video content, the next biggest consumer of HTTP volume is JPEG images (<20% of the volume)
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