Tektronix Delivers Industry s Most Comprehensive and Proactive Quality Control Solution for Multi-Screen TV Services

Tektronix Delivers Industry's Most Comprehensive and Proactive Quality Control Solution for Multi-Screen TV Services 23 Oct 2013

Tektronix (www.tektronix.com), the market leader in broadcast video test, monitoring and analysis solutions, today unveiled Sentry ABR (adaptive bit rate), the latest member of the award-winning Sentry line of digital content monitors and a critical component of the company's comprehensive solution that enables video service providers to ensure the quality of their ABR-based TV Everywhere and OTT services.

Subscribers are not merely demanding to watch any program at any time and on any screen, they expect their TV Everywhere and OTT experiences to be pristine, with superior sound and picture quality. Accomplishing this is not easy and we have engineered our Sentry ABR to help service providers address this critical need for quality after the video is segmented or packaged for multi-screen delivery, said Eben Jenkins, general manager, Video Product Line, Tektronix. The combination of using Sentry to catch video and audio QoE errors pre-fragmentation, plus Sentry ABR to monitor QoS post-fragmentation enables service providers to deliver the best possible TV Everywhere experience.

Sentry ABR uniquely enables service providers to ensure that all of their TV Everywhere and OTT video assets are intact and available for immediate streaming when requested by viewers. Sentry ABR does this by validating all assets, bitrate profiles and manifest files based on a highly parallel HTTP fragment fetching engine. Sentry ABR supports up to 250 top manifests, which translates into a much higher monitoring capacity as each manifest can support up to 12 profiles of each program. Manifest files and fragments can be fetched from any place on the network such as origin servers and content distribution network (CDN) caching servers to simulate a subscriber's request for content.

Complementing Sentry ABR are other models of the Sentry family, which can be used across the entire QC process for ABR content. The first step is to use a Sentry to identify any quality of experience (QoE) errors in programs when they are ingested at the headend. The second critical step is to detect any errors created when these programs are transcoded into the multiple H.264 profiles required for ABR streaming. Sentry is available with two inputs, enabling service providers to use a single Sentry to monitor both their ingested and transcoded video assets. It is after transcoding, and after the programs have been fragmented and packaged that Sentry ABR is used to monitor manifest/playlist availability, integrity and correctness; the availability of all fragments at all profiles and to check network latency/delivery performance for each fragment.

The value of Sentry ABR has been recognized in the Broadband Gear Report's annual Diamond Technology Reviews, which granted it a four Diamond ranking. The judging in this highly regarded program is by a panel of senior engineering and technology executives with some of the largest U.S. cable operators. This marks the sixth time a member of the Sentry family has been awarded four or more Diamonds.

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