VSI Integration Quick Guide

 

Conviva's VSI Integration is a self-service portal that establishes a single source of truth for your metadata strategy and allows you to submit your device application for validation. After you qualify the device application for validation in VSI Integration, set up your device application metadata, integrate Conviva sensors, and submit the qualified device application to Conviva for validation.

The most common reasons for submitting a qualified device application to Conviva for validation are:

  • Initial Conviva SDK or library integration with the application

  • Re-validation for new Conviva SDK/library releases, new application architecture, bug fixes, and media player migration.

If your device application passes Conviva validation completely or with minor issues, then it is ready for launch. If it fails Conviva validation, then you must fix the issues, and re-submit it for validation.

Key Benefits | Prerequisites | Getting Started | Navigation | Workflow

VSI Integration provides several key benefits to help you ensure that your device application is ready for deployment with Conviva sensor:

  • Qualify device applications and Conviva SDKs used for integration

  • Capture, maintain, test, and export metadata strategy

  • Submit device applications for validation to Conviva

  • Review and export validation results

  • View a historical reference of previous validation results

  • Verify integration health reports

Many different roles, such as Solution Consultants, Integration Engineers, Product or Project Managers, and Quality Engineers use VSI Integration to track all types of metadata, validate, and approve Conviva integrations.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you have the device application qualification details, such as app name, media player, and ad-related information.

Getting Started

To get started with VSI Integration, log into App Manager using your Conviva single sign-on credentials, and choose your c3.account.

Navigation

Landing Page

If you do not have any device applications set up in VSI Integration, then the Tell us more about your video service page is displayed:

 If you already have one or more device applications set up in VSI Integration, then the Overview dashboard is displayed:

 

For more information about VSI IntegrationOverview dashboard, refer to Overview Dashboard.

Navigation Menu

The navigation menu allows you to navigate across all the dashboards in VSI Integration.

  • Overview - An overview of your applications and metadata

  • Apps - Qualify, integrate, and validate device applications

  • Metadata - Capture, maintain, and export metadata

  • Reports - To do an integration health check, verify App Statistics and Integration Overview reports

  • Touchstone 2.0 - To perform the self-validation and debugging of the video sensor integration by using the Available Devices page.

Workflow

Qualify Device Application

To qualify a device application, create a new app or edit an existing app. The app must be qualified to determine the test cases for validation testing. Inaccurate qualifications and Conviva Sensor SDK or library identification can lead to inaccurate results.

For example, if you do not specify to Conviva that there are ads in pre-roll, then Conviva doesn't use any of the pre-roll test cases. This leads to inaccurate results.

Use VSI Integration to qualify your device application accurately, and to view all your qualified device applications.

Manage Metadata

Metadata is a powerful way to enrich your analytics. To benefit from Conviva's analytics platform, map your business needs to the metadata that your application passes to Conviva. For example, to measure the viewers' quality of experience with live content versus Video on Demand (VoD) content, pass the metadata that identifies whether the content is live or on demand.

The metadata must be structured uniformly and consistently across all the integrated platforms. All properties, metadata tag keys, and values are case-sensitive.

Conviva categorizes the metadata tags into two buckets:

  • Required (Pre-defined) Metadata - Conviva defines the constants or fixed string keys for commonly used metadata. These metadata keys provide critical information about video and advertisement content, versioning, and workflow.

  • Custom Metadata - Metadata that extend your implementation using custom tag keys that are specific to your business requirement for either video or advertisement content.

Use VSI Integration to set up and validate metadata for the device application.

For more details about metadata, refer to Managing Metadata.

Integrate Device Application with Conviva Sensors

The Conviva sensor integration involves passing events and metadata from video player applications to Conviva sensors APIs to report viewer experience and performance data. To integrate your device application with Conviva sensors, download an SDK from the Integrate SDK/Library tab in the Apps dashboard. Conviva Learning Center provides detailed integration instructions to developers as well as access to download links for Conviva SDKs/Libraries and sample apps.

For more details about Conviva sensor integration, refer to Integrating Device Application.

Validate Device Application

After setting up your device application metadata in VSI Integration, submit the qualified device application to Conviva for validation. You receive an email notification when the build is certified as Validation Passed, Validation Failed, or Validation Passed with Issues. If your device application passes Conviva validation completely or with minor issues, it is ready to be launched. If it fails Conviva validation, then you must fix the issues, and re-submit for validation.

Use VSI Integration to submit the qualified device application for Conviva validation, and review the validation results. Also, share the test case reports with other users.

For more details about submitting builds for Conviva validation, refer to Submitting Builds for Validation.

Verify Integration Reports

The Reports dashboard displays validation test results of metrics and metadata for all of your device applications.
You can choose to see the validation results for either metrics or metadata for all apps or for selected apps.

Use the Reports dashboard to generate reports for App Statistics and Integration Overview.

For more details about integration reports, refer to Verifying Integration Reports.

Launch Device Application

The Qualified Apps dashboard displays the validation status for all device applications. If your device application passes the validation completely or with minor issues, then you can launch the device application.

Before launching your Conviva validated device application:

  • Configure the application to use the production version of your Conviva CUSTOMER_KEY.

  • Disable Touchstone so that the data flows into your production Pulse account.

If your device application fails the validation, then Conviva recommends to fix the issues, and re-submit the device application for validation.