xVu analyses and prioritises quality of experience (QoE) service-impacting events for pay-TV operators. The company has nearly 40 million devices under management, monitoring 13 billion events per month and over 150 billion in 2016 alone. In 2016, Mariner xVu revenues grew above a four-year compound rate of 30%.
By providing operators with a proactive service monitoring approach, the xVu platform allows them to take smarter action against issues such as network degradations, where the root cause may be hard to spot, as it can be at the headend, content delivery network, content itself, neighbourhood network or caused by wireless equipment in the home. Consumers can see their entertainment impacted by buffering, clipping or a complete suspension of service, which can be a blind spot for many operators today.
"The technology landscape is changing and operators are investing in customer satisfaction initiatives while looking to capture economies for serving entertainment, internet, Wi-Fi and mobile offers," said Shaun MacDonald, SVP of business development and marketing at Mariner xVu. "As operators add new entertainment offers, they must address the fragmentation of video capable consumer devices and, at the same time, deploy software systems that support multiple services concurrently."
As consumers demand more mobile, premium entertainment on new devices, operator investment in software automation to drive down operations costs is increasing. The xVu core platform addresses economies of scale, including in-home visibility where Wi-Fi and support for more wireless set-top-boxes, smartphones and tablets is required.
MacDonald added: "Mariner brings experience and expertise to support the operations teams so they can efficiently fix problems based on real time visibility, which has its highest ROI during service launches and updates."