Digital Monitoring a Must

Signal to Noise

By Mike Robuck

Digital monitoring may not have the over-the-top sex appeal of a new Paris Hilton music video, but it does have far more substance, and, we're willing to bet, a longer shelf life.

For service operators in the video business, digital monitoring can reduce operational costs. On that note, Mixed Signals introduced its Medius product suite at last month's CableLabs Summer Conference in Keystone, CO.

"What we've seen so far from the multiple operators who have deployed us is a more than 50 percent reduction in trouble calls," said Mixed Signals President and CEO Eric Conley. "They usually see that within two months of rolling out our monitoring, and those add up to huge cost savings."

In addition to reducing trouble calls, Conley said digital monitoring could also reduce truck rolls that appear to be set-top box related when in reality they're caused by trouble in a carousel or other problems in the headend. The third way it saves money is by helping engineers understand exactly where a problem is; hence, less time is spent trying to locate a problem.

How it works

Medius works in conjunction with up to 15 of Mixed Signals' Sentry Digital Content Monitors. The Sentry provides intelligence about network transport stream behavior combined with analysis of signals and stream data patterns to deliver alerts when anomalies are detected.

For a large operator with multiple Sentries, Medius culls the information from various locations into management reports that look at the entire system. Conley said that Medius comes with standard, cookie cutter reports and detailed reports that are pre-configured, but operators "also have the ability to customize reports on the fly."

With Medius, a customer can configure a Sentry for program grouping and mapping, port names, carousel settings, digital ad insertion, and multicast groups and system settings, as well as generate individual or group alerts.

"We have an advantage in terms of scalability, especially when you look at the amount of functionality in audio/video that we can do," Conley said, when asked how Mixed Signals differs from its competition. "For example, some of the more advanced features - even when the MPEG is perfectly fine - are detecting video freeze, video black, a single speaker of audio silence and those types of things. Nobody does those in scalable manner except for us.

"We can also monitor things that aren't audio or video, things that are strictly data that range from closed caption all the way to digital ad insertion and the monitoring of carousels. Operators today have a huge side of the digital broadcast that is just purely data, and it's growing all of the time with IPTV."

Mixed Signals' product suite can also be used as a historical bandwidth-tracking tool. For example, an operator can check to make sure bandwidth is being optimized by creating custom reports that track bandwidth into QAM groups, as well as monitoring based on an operator's physical architecture.

"They can even create multiple layers of groups where they can have a certain set of groups that are uniquely defined for reporting purposes and another set for alerts," Conley said. "You can group different channels based on what you have going into the QAMs, but on the alert side, you can set up alerts specifically for SD channels and then another set of alerts for carousels and HD channels that are independent from the QAM-based groups."

Conley said cable operators usually deploy Sentry before modulation and after multiplexing on their systems.

"Typically, an operator will try to move out more towards the edge, especially if they've got modulation in the hubs and in the headend itself. That way they're able to capture more issues further towards the customer."

Medius is generally located in a large operator's NOC, or in a central headend, where it can then monitor Sentries that are geographically distributed. A smaller operator without a NOC would probably elect to put a Medius in its headquarters or wherever a core group of engineers are located.

Cablevision an early adopter

Conley said Mixed Signals is in advanced testing with Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Cox for Sentry and has been deployed by Cablevision. Sentry is also in testing with DirecTV and EchoStar and is being sniffed over by IPTV telcos. Medius is also in the test phase with several large operators and has been put in the two headends by Cablevision.

Conley said cable operators start thinking about digital monitoring either before or after they've made the move to digital simulcast because it serves as a good testing tool in the digital simulcast process.

Mixed Signals expects to have an IP monitoring functionality added to Sentry over the next two months via a software upgrade. Conley said switched digital video is also a major focus for the company because it can see exactly what the switch is doing by looking at what channels are on or off and when they are used.

"We're seeing what is supposed to happen and what is actually happening," he said. "We can verify that the system is working and alert report based on that."

The switched digital video implementation, which won't require additional equipment if Sentry and Medius are already deployed, is currently in development, but is slated for rollout next month.

Lastly, Mixed Signals is working with both Cox and Time Warner Cable on testing its product suite in the OCAP environment.