Resources

Our White Papers

	Monitoring the Whole MPEG Transport Stream With baseband usage on the decline, Broadcasters and networks increasingly are recording the native ASI and IP MPEG transport stream and generating low-res proxies for viewing and subsequent troubleshooting. This whitepaper examines continuous MPEG transport stream monitoring and its benefits in supporting compliance logging and air checks, allowing operators to increase logging channel density, and facilitating the inspection and export of transport stream efficiently over a WAN enterprise.
	What Is Loudness? Loudness is a perceptual quantity that can be understood as the degree of the physiological effect produced when a sound stimulates the ear, and it is dependent on factors including bandwidth, frequency, and duration. Today, advertisers have taken advantage of digital audio’s extended dynamic range to push commercials into the headroom portion of the audio, thereby increasing the perceived loudness of those commercials in order to grab viewers’ attention. Government and regulatory bodies across the world have taken up the issue of loudness and legislation has been passed requiring broadcasters to monitor loudness and maintain a log for public inspection.
	Triggered Recording Visual and aural evidence of content quality close to the viewer gives broadcasters and other media companies a much better understanding of program quality and viewer experience. A new capability from Volicon, called triggered recording, allows an operator to identify and record an impairment when it occurs, as well as its potential impact on viewer satisfaction. Because typical analysis tools measure faults in the digital bit stream, they present a “sea of numbers” indicating only the possibility of a fault and displaying an alarm. It can take a great deal of time for engineers and other NOC personnel up the chain to confirm an issue and its source. With triggered recording capability, the digital analysis tools provide an actual recording of a program impairment for the operator’s review and escalation.
	Virtualization Virtualization has brought significant cost and operational benefits to businesses and consumers by enabling different components of IT-based systems to connect and work in orchestra; regardless of their location. In the business world, the usual goal of virtualization is tocentralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and overall hardware-resource use.
	Remote Monitoring Not so long ago, broadcast and media companies seeking to view aired content across the full distribution chain resorted to recording either to tape or a system the equivalent to a collection of modified TiVo’s. Neither solution was ideal, but both were a better alternative than dedicating staff to monitoring at remote sites. Using these recording systems, engineers could go back and review the content that had been broadcast on a particular channel at a given date and time.