21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

16 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue technical broadcast specifications and infrastructure barriers to entry). Now, anybody who wants to say something - be it through Podcast, YouTube channel or something else entirely - has the ability to. The lack of need for regulation and monitoring over the physical, logistical and technical elements of broadcast in theory also closes down the door for regulation over the fundamental content contained within those broadcasts. The IP revolution in the field of broadcast represents the biggest potential democratisation of content imaginable. And yet… Here we are. Operating in a world where the content we are receiving is decidedly undemocratic. Where the policing and control of content is less overt, but still pervasive. It may be the case that governments themselves exercise less legislative control (though it’s still there), but somehow in a world of potentially limitless information, we still find ourselves accessing and consuming only a narrow fraction of it. This is arguably our choice as consumers. Maybe we just really like cat memes? But many argue that the regulation of content remains – it’s just that now the gatekeepers are commercial, rather than political entities (though there’s still a decidedly political flair to the way they choose to operate - and whom they choose to influence). The technological, social, political and commercial are all intertwined in a confusing, hopelessly knotted ball of string. When quantitative becomes qualitative The above argument pertains to all forms of technological advancement. But our field is monitoring, and that specifically may have a fundamental role to play in determining not just how content reaches us, but what content reaches us. It is all too easy for us to sit removed from the situation and hold up our hands, saying ‘it’s none of my business. I’m just monitoring the numbers. We’re not regulating the content of the internet, we’re just keeping it running nice and smooth’. And indeed, that is all we are really doing. In the field of monitoring, we deal with the quantitative. But we already know that the very reason for engaging with that quantitative data is because it paints us a qualitative picture. Registering the movement of packets – mere ones and zeros – translates into information about the quality of broadcast that the audience is receiving. We view objective data and can from that discern a significant amount about the subjective experience of the viewer. And we can do this on a real-time, automated basis, covering millions of users, channels and broadcast streams. Sowhat else canmonitoreddata tell us?The answer is potentially limitless. Both within the wider industry and specifically at Bridge, we gain a greater mastery of ‘making meaning’ from abstract data on a daily basis. We produce intuitive information that allows people to make real decisions about what they are doing with their networks. Those decisions are often technical. But they’re frequently commercial. They can be social. And they might be political. That first breakthrough So we’ve established that data – analysed effectively and presented intuitively – provides information, but the way in which this is deployed can be – not to be too melodramatic about it – a force for good, or a force for evil. At the moment, monitoring within the field is most definitely a force for good. Indeed, I remember the first time I had that concrete feeling that we were on the right path, when I thought ‘By Jove, I think we’ve got it’. I’d foreseen the importance of IP, staked a lot on it and this was in effect my first ‘proof of concept’, where everything I’d scte long read