Frequently Asked Questions

What is Skytide?

We're a software company that helps leading content delivery providers and digital media companies measure and optimize streaming video performance. We call it Digital Media Performance Management.

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Who can benefit from Skytide?

  1. Telcos, ISPs and cable companies who are deploying CDNs, IPTV and TV Everywhere and want to gain a much deeper understanding of their streaming video performance — quality of service (QoS), capacity planning, billing, viewer engagement.
  2. Digital media companies who want to increase profitability and reduce costs by optimizing content delivery and the viewer experience.
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What products does Skytide offer?

  • Skytide Insight for Content Delivery Networks uses server-side log data to provide content delivery providers — and their customers and business partners — with deep insight into streaming media performance.
  • Skytide for Video Players tracks video player events, enabling a detailed understanding of quality of service (QoS) and viewer engagement metrics.
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Who uses Skytide?

A sampling of Skytide customers includes: British Telecom, Cisco, Clear Channel Communications, IBM, MTV Networks, Origin Digital (an Accenture subsidiary), Qwest, Telefonica and thePlaftorm (a Comcast subsidiary).

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I've got a lot of media log files to process. Why should I use Skytide?

  • Highly scaleable: We process massive data volumes without the need for data warehousing.
  • Faster: Skytide analyzes data where it resides for near-real time reporting. Contrast this with the slow extract-transform-load (ETL) process required with typical Business Intelligence solutions.
  • More flexible and comprehensive:

    We analyze all data types and most data sources

    • Structured, unstructured, extensible, historical data
    • CDN streaming logs, Web analytics data, ad network data, online sales revenue and performance rights fees.
  • Lower total cost of ownership than:
    • Building it yourself: Cobbling together several applications will be expensive — requiring up to 100x more hardware and a lot of IT time — and still not deliver what you need. Skytide’s out-of-the-box applications can be deployed far faster, easier and more cost effectively than building and maintaining a home grown solution.
    • Buying a general purpose solution: Skytide provides the only fully functional reporting & analytics solution built specifically to measure content delivery performance. General purpose solutions such as log scraping applications are not oriented to online analytics, have far slower query times and require a lot more storage.
  • Proven solution: Measuring streaming video performance is not new to us. We've worked with leading CDNs and digital media companies for 5 years, invested millions of dollars and 10+ person years in research and development.
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What data formats can Skytide analyze out-of-the-box?

Skytide's unique data ingestion process utilizes XML and XPath to support a large number of data formats right out-of-the-box. We can also add support for a new format in as little as a few hours.

Skytide supports the following data formats and video player types:
Media Server Logs Ad Insertion Logs CDN Logs Video Players
Apple QuickTime DoubleClick (DART) Akamai Adobe Flash
Microsoft Windows Media Atlas Solutions Limelight Open Video Player (OVP)
Microsoft Silverlight   Level3 thePlatform
Adobe Flash   EdgeCast  
RealNetworks RealServer   CDNetworks  
Apache HTTP Server   Cisco CDS-IS  
Squid HTTP Logs      
MP3 (Shoutcast)      
W3C Logs      
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What are the benefits of using XML?

Skytide uses XML as a data model that allows Skytide to easily ingest data from diverse data sources and store it in highly compressed cubes using Skytide's columnar store.

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How much data can Skytide process?

Skytide can be scaled out to meet the demands of even the most demanding workloads. Customers load up to terabytes of data per day.

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Why shouldn't I just use a log scraping application?

Log scraping products can quickly load log files, but they aren't oriented to online analytics. Skytide goes straight from log files to online analytical processing (OLAP). This allows Skytide to have far faster queries and more compact data storage.

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Why can't I just use Hadoop to analyze my logs?

Hadoop MapReduce is a great tool for analyzing terabytes of log data, but it isn't oriented to interactive analytics because queries are submitted as batch jobs. Hadoop solutions also typically require 100x more hardware than a Skytide solution because of Skytide's unique compression technology.

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How do I learn more about Skytide?

Just contact us.

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