Following IPL’s successful development of a monitoring system for a digital cable TV network (see the case study), IPL identified a gap in the test and measurement market. While products were available to monitor digital TV transport stream metadata at the level of isolated table sections, there was no solution availabe to the problem of verifying the tables as a whole. With such a capability, TV broadcast network operators could maintain a higher QoS and respond quickly to a whole range of network faults that would normally only be identified by consumers.
Existing stream monitoring products were not intended for 24x7 monitoring use. Most were analyzers for use by engineers when diagnosing a reported fault. Working from faults reported by customers requires time, a large call centre, and risks churn.
From the outset, Kijito addressed the challenge of monitoring transport streams in a scalable and configurable way. Scalability allows the monitoring of multiple streams, with the ability to ensure metadata integrity between those streams. Configurability brings the ability to tailor the degree of monitoring performed to meet the needs of a particular broadcaster, to account for Kijito’s location within the broadcast chain, and to keep up with the changes that are frequently made to a broadcast network.
IPL ran an R&D project to produce an industrial-strength product.
To meet the scalability and configurability targets, the transport stream capture options had to be unrestricted. A hardware abstraction layer provides excellent support for numerous capture methods. R&D work concentrated on ASI, off-air DVB-T and file capture.
PC-based hardware was selected for Kijito hosting. In this way, embedded PCs can be used for simple monitoring of a small number of streams and large systems can provide a high degree of integrity monitoring of a large number of streams. To further improve flexibility, Kijito supports Microsoft and Linux operating systems.
Reporting is provided by an Alarm Manager. This is also configurable and extensible. It supports various reporting mechanisms, including SNMP.
Kijito offers broadcasters the opportunity to evolve, from the trivial stream testing implied by the ETSI TR 101 290 guidelines, to a level which allows them to validate their network metadata in its entirety.
High level metadata validation is no longer restricted to reactive analysis by broadcast engineers; with Kijito, it can be performed proactively, 24x7 and across the entire network.
Most importantly, Kijito offers broadcasters the ability to keep up with monitoring an ever-changing network and to allow for often unavoidable deviations from the standards and guidelines.