The Next Step In Video Management

Program availability is a key performance indicator for the quality of video distribution as described in the recently published SCTE 168-6 2010 'Recommended Practice for Monitoring Multimedia Distribution Quality'. This newly approved industry practice for monitoring recommends 'availability' as a common language for measuring the quality of video delivery over networks. The performance target for high program availability requires that a subscriber not experience any more than six (HD) to 24 (SD) seconds of errors in a program for a 24-hour period. Using this standardized methodology improves business communication between all parties involved by giving video service providers a way to measure the expected performance of their delivery networks (SLA management) and NEMs a way to measure the reliability of their devices on these networks (OPEX control).

The Common Language that Directly Reflects Subscriber QoE at Any Point in Your Network

• Measures video delivery performance per program
• Expressed as an Availability percentage (e.g. 99.972%)
• “Dial-in” your target Program Availability anywhere in your network
• Uses Errored Second as a consistent measure of video performance

The OPEX Challenge: A Fragmented View

Disparate monitoring systems spread across multiple regions with different owners at each segment make it impossible to get a unified view of program availability. What's needed is a high-level unified view of all video, at all locations, all of the time across the entire video delivery network.

First to Integrate Program Availability Solutions

As a proponent of industry standards that further the video experience, IneoQuest is the first company to incorporate program availability into its solutions which give a complete end-to-end view of video delivery – from source to screen. IneoQuest gives its customers the intelligence needed for controlling OPEX and managing SLA compliance by continually monitoring programs at multiple, simultaneous strategic locations, also a SCTE recommend practice. Integral to the IneoQuest approach is harvesting vast amounts of real-time data, deriving accumulated errored seconds over a monitored period and then generating simple to use Program Availability reports. Over time these reports provide trending analytics for assessing the operational health of a video network.

The company contributed toward the development of the SCTE HMS committee's 'Recommended Practices of Monitoring'. To receive a copy of the standard and to learn more about the value of high availability in the article, The Mandate for High Availability Video Programming click here.