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Distributed Content
Verification: Connecting the Dots Between Content and Quality
Other Topics:
Interactive Video Ads, IPTV
PVR Advancements
James Welch
January 12, 2009
One of the most consistent issues in broadcast engineering has been
correlating the quality between the content sent out from the
broadcaster to its service provider partners and that same content
as it appears in the subscriber s home. How do you know that the
quality content you ve delivered to your service provider is the
same content appearing on television sets of your target audience-
and how can you prove content quality to advertisers and potential
subscribers? |
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The conversion from analog to
digital video distribution creates content verification challenges
for broadcasters, video service providers and equipment
manufacturers. These challenges include validating and accurately
auditing when, where and how content was played. This challenge can
start with a trouble call from a viewer and can travel up the
content food chain to the advertiser who wants proof that his ad
played at the appropriate time and channel.
There has been a critical lack of cost-effective methods for
automatically verifying baseband video and audio content as a
subscriber experiences it in their home. Existing solutions force
many service providers to engineer their own, often cumbersome,
workarounds with limited feature sets that can even have the
potential of violating copyright laws through unauthorized program
archiving. Some providers even send out employees to subscriber
zones to spend hours watching live programming a costly endeavor
that isn t foolproof and doesn t allow for archiving.
The Solution: Distributed Content Verification
To accurately monitor content as it appears in a viewer s home,
service providers need a solution that solves all of the above
problems in a cost-effective, repeatable manner. The ideal solution
is a baseband content monitoring and auditing technology that
delivers both real-time and historical metrics for use in a variety
of applications, such as verifying ad insertion (e.g., splice
performance verification and ad auditing) and monitoring each
channel for any transport glitches such as freeze frames, black
screens or audio defects.
It may sound like a far-off technology scenario, but the technology
for this type of solution does exist today. Using intelligent,
distributed video network probes, providers can consistently and
easily gather information and view it from the Network Operating
Center just as it appears at the home viewer s set-top box. The
probes are compact, robust units with a 10/100 Mb/s management
network connection, USB ports, composite analog video and audio RCA
inputs and a remote-remote IR output for set-top-box channel change
and function control. They can even remotely cycle set-top-box
power. These probes are managed through purpose-built content
monitoring software which can be customized to the broadcaster or
service provider s specifications.
The content monitoring software enables automatic, frame-by-frame
video and audio content verification, detecting black screens,
luminance levels, freeze frames, and audio levels. Additionally,
this automated software provides an industry-unique, mosaic view of
video thumbnails for immediate, live visual confidence monitoring
and program playout verification far more accurate than a cable
company employee sitting in a truck watching television. Leveraging
powerful database architecture, this hardware/software system
enables efficient retrieval and post capture analysis trending and
performance tracking, as well as real time alarming.
Together, these network probes and content verification software
meet the remote content validation challenges for service providers.
This distributed system solution is less expensive and simpler to
operate than work-around solutions and can be installed anywhere
baseband content is available for monitoring. This can be at a
headend or contribution site fed from reference decoders to provide
a continuous, uninterrupted frame-by-frame ingest monitoring
solution.
Whether the challenge is for broadcasters who need to report ad
verification to program sponsors or service providers
troubleshooting content issues on specific channels, distributed
content verification offers a holistic, cost-effective solution. As
the race for content market share becomes tighter, the need for
repeatable Quality of Experience metrics will give forward-thinking
players the tools they need to retain subscribers and keeps
advertisers happy. Today s broadcasters and service providers know
that revenue assurance is the key to continued success, and
investing in purpose-built, next-generation tools as opposed to
on-the-fly, quick-fix workarounds is the most sound method to
achieve this.
About the Author
James Welch (jim.welch@ineoquest.com) is a Senior Consulting
Engineer with
IneoQuest
Technologies. Before joining
IneoQuest,
he was Vice President of Engineering for UB Networks and later
Newbridge Networks. James has developed copper and fiber based
networking equipment using both packet-based and ATM technologies
used in mission critical applications for Fortune 100 companies for
over 15 years. |
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