Advanced Television

UK’s TalkTalk deploys Agama solution for IPTV head-end quality assurance

September 6, 2011

Agama Technologies, the DTV quality assurance expert, has announced that the UK service provider and YouView partner TalkTalk has deployed a powerful service monitoring solution from Agama 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 and of high quality 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, as they can’t be detected in 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, has taken the first step in true end-to-end IPTV service quality assurance and selected Agama Technologies to provide a cutting-edge head-end monitoring solution.

“It’s with great pleasure I see that our powerful head-end monitoring offering proved to be the best fit for TalkTalk, enabling massive content level analysis in a cost and space efficient way,” says Mikael Dahlgren, CEO, Agama Technologies. “We warmly welcome TalkTalk as a new Agama customer, and look forward to being their quality assurance partner in the exciting future ahead of the UK market.”

The installation includes Agama Analyzer H-E, a powerful tool for 24/7 full-service quality monitoring in the head-end, as well as Agama Enterprise Server for central management, presentation, and extensive alarm handling. With advanced monitoring of numerous simultaneous video streams also before encryption, TalkTalk can efficiently verify the outgoing content feeds their head-end produces. The solution detects conditions such as black screen, freeze frame, audio silence and excessive macroblocking, but also provides complete syntactic and semantic verification of all levels of the TV stream. It also features add-on functionalities for live confidence monitoring, validation of configured properties of transport streams and error triggered stream recording.

Categories: IPTV, Press Releases