UK service provider and YouView partner TalkTalk has deployed a service monitoring solution from Agama Technologies in its IPTV head-end.
With continuous real-time monitoring of all streams, detecting everything from packet loss to freeze-frame conditions, TalkTalk gains true control and understanding of the service quality as it leaves the head-end.
Ensuring that the audio and video content-level payload is correct is crucial for the end user's perceived quality of a TV service. Errors introduced in the head-end, or even before entering the head-end, need to be detected early to avoid costly misdirected troubleshooting downstream.
Discovering these problems requires content level monitoring, because such problems can't be detected with regular IP, transport stream or deep packet inspection analysis. For this purpose, TalkTalk, one of the leading ISPs in the UK and part of the YouView project, selected Agama Technologies.
The installation includes the Agama Analyzer H-E, a tool for 24/7 full-service quality monitoring in the head-end, as well as Agama Enterprise Server for central management, presentation and alarm handling. With advanced monitoring of numerous simultaneous video streams before encryption, TalkTalk can verify the outgoing content feeds their head-end produces. The solution detects conditions such as black screen, freeze frame, audio silence and excessive macroblocking. It also provides complete syntactic and semantic verification of all levels of the TV stream.
