Playback quality defines the success of every streaming service, shaping how viewers perceive the value of the content they consume. A single session can generate hundreds of signals that reflect performance, including start-up times, buffering events, and error codes. The challenge is that these signals are reported differently depending on the video player in use, whether it is open source, native, or commercial. This inconsistency leaves providers with gaps in their data that make it harder to diagnose problems or fully understand audience behavior. Without a unified approach to capturing and interpreting playback data, even small issues can remain hidden until they grow into patterns that harm engagement, increase churn, and threaten revenue streams. The pressure is even greater as services expand across devices and networks, where a lack of visibility can quickly undermine both user trust and operational efficiency.
This blog explains how Bitmovin’s Analytics collectors close those gaps, why session-level observability matters, and how our most recent work with Qualabs produced a new collector that expands the ecosystem even further.
How collectors work
Analytics collectors, like the ones included with Bitmovin Analytics, are lightweight SDKs that run inside a streaming service’s application alongside the video player. Their job is simple but powerful: capture playback events in real time using predefined mappings, then deliver that data to a backend for analysis, visualization and observability. This approach removes the need for streaming services to design or test event schemas on their own when using a commercial player, unless they choose to build the integration themselves (explored further in our Analytics TCO blog). With only a few lines of code, teams can start collecting accurate data immediately and focus on delivering great playback experiences, while trusting that every signal is structured correctly from the start.
The range of events a collector typically captures includes:
- Audience metrics that show how long people watch, how many sessions are active, and when viewers drop off
- Quality of Experience metrics such as buffering events, start-up times, and bitrate shifts
- Real-time user actions like play, pause, seek, and resume
- Error reporting that identifies failures, retries, and error codes
- Session tracking to link events to a unique viewer session and record its duration
- Device and platform context that captures information about the browser, operating system, or device type in use
Once deployed, a collector continuously streams data from the player into the analytics backend. That data is then stored, visualized, and made available in real time through data observability. The result is a complete record of how each playback unfolded, showing not just what happened but when and why. For streaming services, this level of consistency across different players transforms raw events into a reliable source of truth that engineering, operations, and product teams can all act on.
Why collectors matter for streaming services
Collectors give streaming services more than just raw playback data. They establish consistency across a fragmented landscape of players, which is critical for building trust in the insights teams rely on. Without that consistency, services are left second-guessing whether spikes in buffering or drops in engagement reflect a widespread issue or just noise in the reporting. With collectors in place, every session is measured against the same model, creating a reliable foundation for both technical troubleshooting and business strategy. Beyond the initial integration, collectors maintained by third parties like Bitmovin also remove the ongoing burden of keeping up with player updates and API changes, freeing teams to focus on improving the viewer experience rather than reworking event mappings.
Key benefits include:
- Faster troubleshooting: Issues can be identified and resolved in minutes rather than hours.
- Reduced cost and effort: Predefined mappings cut down on the need for custom engineering work and lengthy validation cycles.
- Business alignment: A single source of truth supports both technical teams and decision-makers, bridging the gap between performance data and strategy.
- Better monetization opportunities: Accurate session-level insights reveal how quality impacts engagement, helping optimize revenue streams.
- Scalability with confidence: As services expand to new platforms and devices, observability scales with them, ensuring no gaps in visibility.
At the same time, decision-makers gain visibility into how quality directly influences revenue, making it possible to link playback performance to business outcomes in a way that was previously out of reach. This combination of operational efficiency and business insight is what makes collectors indispensable for modern streaming services.
Analytics collectors
Streaming services rely on a wide variety of players to reach audiences across browsers, mobile devices, and connected TVs. Each of these players has its own way of reporting playback events, which makes it difficult to create a consistent and reliable view of performance. Bitmovin’s Analytics addresses this challenge with a broad set of collectors that ensure signals from every player are measured against the same model. This breadth of support is what eliminates blind spots, allowing streaming services to extend observability across their entire playback environment. By combining data from different players into a single framework, Bitmovin Analytics creates a clear picture of how every stream performs, regardless of platform.
Current collectors include support for:
- Bitmovin Player (Analytics built-in)
- HTML5 video element
- HLS.js
- Dash.js
- Video.js
- Shaka Player
- ExoPlayer (Android)
- AVPlayer (iOS)
- Roku
- Dolby OptiView (THEOplayer) — recently launched in partnership with Qualabs
These represent the core collectors most widely used by streaming services today. For the full list of supported platforms, including Smart TVs, consoles, and additional SDKs, visit the official documentation: Supported Platforms – Analytics Collectors.
Strengthening Bitmovin’s observability through collaboration with Qualabs
The newest collector for Bitmovin’s Analytics was built in collaboration with Qualabs, a trusted engineering partner in the streaming space. This release adds support for Dolby OptiView (THEOplayer), ensuring that services using commercial players outside Bitmovin’s own ecosystem are not left with blind spots and benefit from Bitmovin’s observability capabilities. By focusing on partnerships like the one with Qualabs, Bitmovin continues to expand its coverage, remove gaps that limit visibility, and provide streaming services with consistent, actionable insights. The collaboration with Qualabs is another step in a broader mission to give streaming services confidence that every session is reliably measured and fully understood.
“The collaboration between Bitmovin, Dolby, and Qualabs was remarkably smooth and agile. By combining Qualabs’ expertise in streaming, player development, and analytics with the openness and collaborative mindset of all teams, we made the entire journey seamless and highly productive.” – Nicolás González, Head of Customer Success @ Qualabs
Conclusion
Playback remains the defining moment of every streaming experience, and without reliable observability, even small issues can have an outsized impact on audiences and revenue. Collectors solve this challenge by bringing consistency to a fragmented player landscape, saving teams from the ongoing burden of building and maintaining their own integrations. When combined with Bitmovin’s Analytics, they provide streaming services with session-level visibility that benefits both engineers and decision-makers, turning raw playback data into actionable insights. With the continued expansion of its collector ecosystem and collaborations like the one with Qualabs, Bitmovin is committed to ensuring that no viewing session goes unmeasured and that streaming services have the clarity they need to deliver exceptional experiences.
