Reporting Tools Lacking For Companies That Delivery Videos Online

I speak to a lot of companies that do their own hosting and delivery for video content, be it downloads or streaming, live or on-demand. Many of them are enterprise organizations who have found it makes more sense for them to distribute their own content across their private networks because it is cheaper, gives them more control of their content and gives them additional flexibility. In addition to Fortune 1000 corporations, there are also a lot of smaller content owners and publishers who have a few servers setup to stream audio and video.

With all those servers in the market, to date there is still not a single good software package that you can buy off the shelf that will parse your raw logs and give you the kind of data you need from the logs. I’m talking about a software package that is setup just to parse raw logs for streaming and not something like WebTrends which was not built for video and does not work well for streaming. Back in the 2000 era you had a reporting product made by Lariat, which was then bought by EnScaler, which then went out of business at least 5 years ago.

In that time, there have been no other solutions on the market. Yes, there are a lot of third party tools out there, many of them free like FunnelWeb, Sawmill etc… but they all have many limitations, especially when it comes to large log files. So my question is this. Why has no software company created a package that is specific to a particular hosting platform? The demand is there. I hear from companies all the time who say they would pay $1,000 for a software package like this. Just think of how many companies are out there in the enterprise with Windows Media servers, that market alone is huge. And right now, they all try to do it themselves, write their own software, or use a third party tool that does not give them what they want.

Why has no one jumped all over this and developed a solution? Once you develop the product, the only overhead you have is support and upgrades and you could easily have a consulting side to the business that builds something specific for a customer. Why is no software company addressing this need in the market when there is such a demand and it’s not complex or expensive to do?

Someone somewhere needs to built this product and I want to work with them to do it. A product like this would go a long way to helping our industry as a whole.