Pay TV video quality specialist IneoQuest reckons that its new VeriFrame product line opens up an entirely new dimension for pay TV networks, doing pretty much what it says in the name, verifying that the right frames reach the right people.
Calvin Harrison, the company’s VP of Marketing, said that one network had no idea that it was sending out adult material on the station that should have been showing the Disney channel, due to difficulties in keeping track of the new switched digital cable delivery, and because they had nothing that would show them the exact nature of the video that was traveling down every part of a major footprint pay TV operation.
It turns out there have been two major ways of keeping an eye on your content delivery until now, you can send people out in trucks to tap into the network and find out what it is that you are actually delivering, or you can install placeshifting boxes from Sling Media, pointed back at your NOC.
This is especially an issue when there are regional variations in viewing, and especially when advertisements are localized, and a network wants to provide proof that the advert it sold ran in the right place, at the right time, within the right programs.
‘It’s not really economic to put remote eyes in a local market whether they are trucks on the road, or PCs, Sling Boxes or servers in each advertising region, collecting what are Terrabytes of video data just to set your mind at rest that your network delivered what it should,’ said Harrison. ‘There is also a copyright legal issue with PC based video capture.’
What VeriFrame does begins with another of what IneoQuest calls a ‘Cricket,’ tiny FPGA driven boxes out in the field, which in its current product range report back on transport issues like bit-error rates and jitter. So it has added a new version which takes a thumbnail of the video that is being delivered in a cable, satellite or IPTV connection, once every second and this can be forwarded back to any number of network controllers to literally watch screenfulls of them to tell if they are delivering blank or frozen screens, the right advert, or in some cases even the right channel. The ‘frame grabber’ thumbnails are far less data intensive than full video, there are no copyright issues and they can be flushed from the cricket when the program has been delivered successfully, every 30 minutes or so.
At the central iVMS (IQ video management system) station where IneoQuest customers monitor traffic, a new module shows up as if it were a probe and controllers can drop down to the video dimension, and a new iCMS (IQ content management system) collects all the data from the new VeriFrame crickets and shows it onscreen.
‘One way people use this is to make sure that any important or difficult customer can see the exact delivery schedule for advertising was met. In the past a phone call from a client saying that his advert didn’t run properly was very hard to argue with,’ said Harrison.
The system can show 100s of channel samples on a single software screen and show their alignment with their audio signal at the same time.
It’s fairly obvious that this is taking pay TV advertising the same way that Google’s DoubleClick has taken internet advertising, with web based reporting going directly from these markets all the way back to the advertising client.
It is particularly important to have access to something like VeriFrame when cable operators are using Switched Digital delivery, where channels are not broadcast from the QAM until there is a request for them and they are allocated a channel dynamically. This is done to harvest cable bandwidth for other applications like voice and VoD, but it means that in different parts of the market each TV channel on the cable is in a different frequency.
‘Where advertising is regionalized, service providers find they have to re-calibrate their ad servers every ten days or so because they have a timing drift, which shows up when adverts begin splicing into the wrong parts of programs. We’ve seen frames with half of an advert and half the program, and VeriFrame alerts you to when that’s a problem,’ Harrison added.
Existing IneoQuest customers would need a whole new set of Cricket devices installed within the network, to work alongside those already focused on monitoring network problems, but Harrison said, ‘This is installed already at 5 different customers doing content validation and avert validation, and 2 of those customers are in Europe.