Football frustrations – a personal experience

Every football fan (or soccer fan, for those of you in the US) in Europe and worldwide was watching the El Clasico last Saturday. For those readers who are not die-hard football fans, I will just say that this is “The Game” – between the two biggest rivals in the Spanish football league. Needless to say, it’s a big deal.

No doubt, the best viewing experience for a game of this magnitude is a 50” HD TV set in the living room, surrounded by good friends, cold beer, and plentiful snacks. But recently, with the proliferation of large screen smartphones and handsets, a new mobile experience was introduced. In theory, you can now watch entire football matches on your mobile device, in high video resolution, over advanced 3G and 4G mobile networks.  But does this really work, and can it satisfy a true football fan?

Honestly, not always.

First of all, for this kind of experience your mobile device becomes stationary by default. Your device’s battery consumption while watching multimedia is so huge, you have to stay close to a power supply.

Secondly, the video viewing experience is obviously affected by the quality of your network. The high expenses and environmental limitations of mobile networks naturally create bottlenecks during the busy hour, which means not everyone can watch a live game at the same time in a limited geographical area. The result – a frustrating viewing experience with frequent stalls and freezes. And unlike the battery issue, where users are prone to blame the device manufacturer, when your viewing experience is affected, you blame the mobile operator. Is this what I’m paying for?!?

Mobile operators know this but are very limited in how to deal with the problem. They can’t just provide unlimited bandwidth to everyone who wants it. Some operators plan to offer you more bandwidth during the busy hour for extra money. But how would they do this? In order to allocate additional bandwidth for premium users, they will have to reduce the bandwidth of their remaining subscribers. And the most common way to do this is to throttle videos using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliances. While this might solve the problem for premium users, it will also create a lot of unsatisfied customers – those who haven’t upgraded their data packages.

A better alternative would be to adapt the video to a lower bitrate whenever needed. This would make the video watchable for everyone, albeit with slightly lower (but still entirely acceptable) quality. If I had to watch Christiano Ronaldo’s goal, and the network was loaded, I would prefer to see it with slightly lower quality rather than have it freeze at the critical moment right before the kick. And I think my fellow football fans would agree with me.

The El Clasico ended with Madridista fans cheering for a 2-1 victory which probably leads the way to a championship over the glorious Barcelona. And with the new technologies, everyone should be able to see the next nail-biter on their mobile device.

And to help you get the impending summer season started in a typical Spanish style, here is a nice quick way to make your own Sangria:

Ingredients:

• 1 bottle of red wine
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup orange juice (natural)
• 4 tablespoons lemon juice
• 100 ml rum
• 3 peaches
• 2 apples

1. Melt the sugar in a small amount boiled water and chill
2. Cut the fruit into small cubes
3. Put all the ingredients in a big bowl and stir well
4. Chill well (better with large ice cubes than small ones, as they chill faster and melt slower)
5. To make it extra festive, you can add 250 ml of vodka

Enjoy!

-- Amir Lapid, Director of Product Management

What do mobile experience and a first grader’s math class have in common?

I’d like to tell you a little bit about my son’s day in school.

In fact, I would be happy to talk about it for the better part of the day.

The problem is, I don’t know much about it.

I only know it was “fun.”

Actually, I’m not sure about that either. “Fun,” is the automatic reply I get when I ask him, “How was your day at school?”

So what does this have to do with the mobile experience?

Mobile operators’ knowledge of what their subscribers are doing and how users experience the mobile Internet is similar in many ways to a father asking his son how his day was.

Operators may have limited knowledge about the radio side of the network, but not much more. This is analogous to me knowing my son’s curriculum. I may know when he starts  his math class and when he has recess, but I don’t know how he felt in class. Did he enjoy himself? Or maybe (like too many of us) he hated every minute. And what did he do during recess? Did he play football? Maybe he had an argument with his best friend?

In the same way, operators today are looking for ways to know more about their subscribers’ experience and they need to have clear metrics to do so.

What are their users most interested in while they surf the web? (Maybe you can offer them a deal that relates to their field of interest.)

What was their experience? How long did it take for the video to start? How long did it take the page to load? (Maybe you can prevent subscriber churn if you spot a problematic event and act on it.)

To help operators answer these questions, and many more, we enable them to extract user experience data from their networks. But we also provide much more information, such as data hogging subscribers, top applications, top web sites, average browsing speed, and more! All this information helps operators create a more complete picture of their subscribers’ online behavior to better target their interests while addressing any problems that may arise – a win-win for both you and your users.

Of course, you could always just ask your subscribers how their experience was but you’ll probably get the equivalent of “fun” as an answer.

-- Tal Dagan, Director of Product Management

Welcome

Welcome to Flash Networks' official company blog. We plan on posting our thoughts, ideas, analysis, insight, and general comments on the exciting and ever-evolving world of the mobile Internet. Stay tuned for more ...