Tektronix Solution For Monitoring Perceptual Video Quality At Full Line Rate

Tektronix, a leading provider of digital content monitoring solutions, has announced that it has added significant new capabilities to its award-winning Sentry digital content monitor.
The Sentry 5.0 release enables Sentry to perform in-depth monitoring of video streams at full line rate - 1 Gbps per unit. This performance enables video service providers to monitor hundreds of video streams per unit, which reduce the number of Sentrys to comprehensively monitor a large multi-channel lineup.
Sentry 5.0 introduces eMOS, or Perceptual Video Quality, which helps service providers tackle content errors where the QoE score is good but the programme suffers artifacts due to over-compression which is common in motion intensive programmes like sports. In addition, the new release includes GOP length statistics, RTP support and new reason codes that help service providers quickly understand the source of an issue.
Eric Conley, Vice President Video Network Monitoring, Tektronix, said: "Cable operators and other video service providers are continually adding new live and on-demand services which increase the complexity of their networks and consequently increase the likelihood of video and audio errors.
"Our commitment to adding new features and capabilities to the industry-leading Sentry family of products keeps our customers one step ahead of their competition and allows them to rapidly expand their service offerings while ensuring a high quality viewing experience."
Full line rate monitoring complements the advanced artifact detection feature recently added to Sentry's Quality of Experience (QoE) scoring capability with new reason codes and its new mean opinion scores (eMOS) scoring capabilities. These metrics can be used to compare and track the qualitative performance of audio and video programmes throughout the video network, enabling root cause analysis of degradations in quality and automatic prioritisation of issues based on subscriber impact. For example, Sentry can generate video quality scores on incoming feeds at the headend prior to multiplexing, which gives a baseline score for each programme. After the programmes are multiplexed, another Sentry can generate single-ended MOS and QoE scores of the resulting channel line-up to determine if the video or audio quality has been affected. This scoring process can be conducted at all recommended monitoring points in the network to provide an overview of the health of each programme.
(KMcA/GK)