Precision Quick Guide

Conviva's Precision empowers video publishers to maximize the value of their multi-CDN / multi-resource video delivery strategy through a flexible business policies engine with real-time QoE measured at every viewer device, enabling the Precision Video AI API to recommend the best CDN or resource to deliver video to viewers.

Key Benefits

Maximize Service Uptime: Fall back to an alternate CDN when the primary CDN under-performs.
Minimize CDN Costs: Send more traffic to the cheaper CDN without compromising QoE. Easily switch traffic during or after contract negotiations.
Optimize Viewer QoE: Use each CDN when it performs the best and within constraints defined by the business policies.
Self Healing and Generic Resource Optimization: Define delivery resources based on stream URL path patterns and configure Precision to choose the best performing resource for your viewers based on encoding policy, redundant resource, and multiple CDNs.
Guarantee QoE during High-Concurrency Events: Balance traffic based on how well CDNs handle peak load.
From Single to Multi-CDN Risk Free: Introduce new CDNs and run POCs without risking QoE.
Internal CDN Offload: Use a third-party CDN only when traffic spikes to a level above the internal CDN capacity or when the internal CDN experiences performance problems.

Prerequisites

Before getting started with Precision, ensure that the following requirements are met:

Conviva VSI is implemented on at least one player. Precision's recommendation service API is built on the data that is collected through the Conviva VSI integration.
Multiple CDN / Multiple Delivery Resource architecture.

Getting Started

Precision runs as a Conviva Pulse application. To get started with Precision, request permission from your administrator who will contact Conviva Support (support@conviva.com) to have your account enabled. Once your account is enabled, access Precision from the Conviva Pulse application selector in the left navigation panel.

Precision Policies

Conviva policies govern the CDN switching decisions to optimize QoE with CDN cost management. Policy constraints enable different policy models for the most optimized switching methods:

Distribution Policies
Throttling Policies
Optimization Logic

For more information about Precision policies, see Precision Basics.

Policy Management

Use precision to view, prioritize, manage, schedule, and track policies.

Viewing Policies

To access the policies, click the Application Selector, and click Precision.

By default, the Policies dashboard appears and the Policies tab is displayed.

Using Distribution policies, you can divide traffic among the CDNs that are configured for your Conviva account based on relative total shares that you have defined. With a distribution policy, you can specify the percentage of traffic that must be directed to each CDN and the quality considerations that may impact that allocation.

Prioritizing Policies

When a Precision request matches more than one policy, the first matching policy is used. Use the main kebab icon to change the prioritize policies and enforce the desired switching behavior.

Click Change Log to view the previous updates in policies.

To change policies, select and drag a policy to the desired position.

In the Change Log, click View Detail to view the updated settings.

For more information about the Policies dashboard, see Policies Dashboard.

Managing Policies

You can edit, clone, delete, and activate policies.

Note: Administrators can not create new Distribution policies or configure new resources Only selected administrators can edit the Distribution policies.

Precision supports different versions (for example, high and low volume versions) of the same policy, so you can easily apply different policies to the same audience as defined by the policy filter.

Use the kebab icon on a policy widget to get the following options:

Note: The widget of the active policy is highlighted.

Edit - Modifies the name of the policy and adds or removes resources.
Clone - Creates a copy of the policy with clone <id> in the policy name.
Delete - Deletes the policy.
Activate - Deactivates the current policy and activates the selected policy.

Note: You can drag resources within a policy resource share to reorder the resource selection priority.

For more information about managing policies, see Policies Dashboard.

Scheduling Policies

Use the Policy Scheduler in Precision to schedule single or multiple policies for activation. You can schedule policies to be activated from 15 minutes up to 90 days in the future.

Note: Precision supports the activation of up to 15 policies (1 primary policy and 14 backup policies). For example, during live events, you could activate up to 15 policies immediately or at a scheduled time.

You can view, edit, and delete a policy after it is scheduled.

For more information about scheduling policies, see Policies Dashboard.

Tracking Policies

You can view the overall policy request summary and access the detailed policy activity. The Policy Tracking dashboard also displays the summary of the policy's data.

Click a policy to view details such as a time series of requests and request assignment data.
Compare traffic shares that are specified in the policy (% Configured) with the actual traffic allocated by Precision (% Actual) to verify load balancing.

Note: Depending on the optimization algorithm associated with the policy, there may be differences.
On a policy widget, click the drop-down menu to access more options such as sharing a link of the data.

For more information about the Policy Tracking dashboard, see Policy Tracking Dashboard.

Precision API Reference

Conviva Precision API uses query parameters to encode all of the information that Conviva Precision needs to select session parameters (resource and / or bitrates) and return the best CDN or Resource to deliver video for each viewer. A Resource can be just a CDN, a CDN from a given origin, a POP or Edge from an internal CDN, etc.

For more information about Precision API, see Conviva Precision API Reference.

Precision Precision Precision