Maintaining the quality and reliability of a DVB broadcast service is critical to the network operators, to the content providers and to the service consumers. There are many tools that offer to help the operator to meet that goal. But how effective are they?
There are well known manufacturers which will supply equipment for basic television broadcast monitoring. But in effect, the current commercially available tools do not allow the network operators to see a complete picture of the services that they have to carry.
There are, for example, devices which check the quality of the audio and video components of an individual TV service. There is an accelerating trend towards automated audio/video monitoring of the ever growing number of digital TV services. The days of having people staring at banks of monitors are fast becoming history. For this to happen, automated qualitative monitoring of multiple video and audio components is required. A number of product vendors have taken on this challenging task with a good degree of success.
There are also tools available for making the ETSI TR 101 290 measurements that so many network operators choose to rely on. Virtually all industrial-strength transport stream analysers offer facilities to make those measurements. However, in many cases, these devices are really intended for use by broadcast engineers when tracing known faults. They are not dedicated monitoring systems. Indeed, the costs associated with deploying such systems to monitor an entire broadcast network would be exorbitant. If continuous ETSI TR 101 290 monitoring is necessary, one must employ dedicated monitoring equipment.
So, as a broadcast network operator, you have now got the basics covered: automatic monitoring of video, audio and ETSI TR 101 290 measurements. Is that enough? Is everything covered? Can you afford to leave it at that? No, no and no. There is a great gap of critically important but unmonitored information. That information is the stream metadata, for example the programme specific information tables which direct the IRD in its service decoding, and without which the broadcast network is useless.
There are of course ETSI standards governing that metadata, including ETSI EN 300 468 and ETSI TR 101 211. In fact, it is from the latter standard that many of the ETSI TR 101 290 guidelines are derived, albeit incompletely. For the metadata to be valid, many relationships have to be maintained between its components. Those relationships can be between items on a single transport stream, or between items on different streams. Furthermore, broadcast networks almost certainly carry broadcaster specific information and may or may not conform to the DVB standards.
If the metadata is wrong, then the broadcast service, however good its audio/video components, will be unusable when it gets to the customer’s decoder. In fact, a fault in the metadata can wreck far more than a single service, and so can have far wider-reaching effects than an isolated audio/video fault. The results of metadata faults are typically a flood of calls to the broadcaster’s call centre, followed by long lasting damage to its reputation. It cannot be sane, from either an engineering or a business perspective, to leave this information unmonitored.
Clearly it is vital that content be delivered correctly to the consumer’s TV, which includes the delivery of the service information that the IRD needs so that the consumer can navigate between services. To monitor the whole situation, a higher level of monitoring system is needed. Why then do networks only trouble to monitor jitter, picture quality and packet formation? One reason is that there hasn’t been an effective metadata analysis tool on the market. IPL has now changed that.
Bringing together its Telecoms and Broadcast sector network management skills, IPL has developed Kijito, a versatile transport stream monitor and analyser, capable of being deployed economically throughout a broadcaster’s network. It operates at a level above that of conventional broadcast analyzers, by interpreting and verifying the transport stream metadata. Kijito’s strength lies in its configurability to meet the specific monitoring and analysis needs of a particular broadcaster and to support them as their network evolves.
Kijito supports 24x7 monitoring of multiple transport streams, reporting detected faults to a centralised Fault Management System using SNMP facilities. Capable of capturing streams of various formats (including off-air), it may be deployed to various locations within a broadcast network. Distribution of Kijito systems throughout the broadcast chain assists with automated root cause analysis.
Kijito operates on commodity hardware. Detailed configurations can be selected to suit the number of streams to be monitored, the level of verification required and the operating environment.