Validating Signal Integrity: American Forces Network
Operated by the Department of Defense, the Defence Media Center (DMC) of the American Forces Network (AFN) provides stateside radio and television programming – “a touch of home” – to approximately 800,000 U.S. service men and women as well as DoD civilians and their families serving outside the United States in 177 countries and aboard Navy ships at sea. And now, the DMC has implemented the Observer to log and monitor all of the facility’s broadcasts. The Observer will be the first broadcast system linked into the DMC’s local area network (LAN) and will allow the center to review logged content over its IT infrastructure for the first time.
The DMC’s Observer system includes 40 SD-SDI channels for monitoring the outbound transmission integrity of all AFN radio and television broadcasts. The Observer system will automatically ingest, reference, and recall all as-run traffic data and correlate that data against logged media. In addition, Observer will log and proactively alert operators to transmission defects such as loss of audio and video, static or black video, and loss of closed captions.
By logging onto the LAN via their own PCs, DMC operators will be able to search for and retrieve video clips by closed caption data, channel, date and time, as-run logs and custom data sources. Along with proactively diagnosing and correcting transmission faults, operators will also be able to easily extract clips for quality control review and equipment failure analysis. In addition, a local quality control station will allow technicians to review content for the accurate placement of cue tones channel-by-channel and system-wide using a tone decoder.
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