Here at Mux, we're working hard at providing valuable insight* into your viewer's experience. One of the ways we do this is with specific dimensions, such as browser, operating system, and country (among others). These dimensions allow you to slice your data in order to get at the root of the problem, and we added another one this week that we think will be very useful: ASNs.
Now, you might be wondering what an ASN is, and how that might be helpful. An ASN is a unique identifier which is assigned to each Autonomous System in the Internet. Furthermore, an Autonomous System is a collection of IP routing prefixes, which is run and maintained by one or more organizations. See, isn't that helpful?
In practice, ASNs (almost always) uniquely identify the ISP that the viewer is currently using to access the Internet. However, this isn't a 1:1 mapping: very large ISPs will often have multiple ASNs, with each one focused on a specific region. Combining this data with the country (which Mux already provides) can provide valuable insight into specifically where and through whom your customers are viewing your content, making it easy to see where your video performance may be suboptimal.
If you have already integrated Mux into your system, you will see ASN data without any changes, and this data will be backfilled to mid-December 2016. If you don't have an account yet but want more information on Mux, please get in touch!
- Justin
* P.S. - Keep an eye out for a larger feature dropping next week!
