Advanced Television

Altibox extends Agama quality assurance with OTT video service monitoring

August 28, 2012

Agama Technologies, the video service quality assurance expert, today announces that Norwegian triple-play service provider Altibox expands its existing end-to-end IPTV quality monitoring solution from Agama into the over-the-top space. The extended Agama solution will help ensure that ‘Altibox Chill’, a TV Everywhere service to multiple viewing devices, is always available with the right quality to meet customer expectations.

Launched in December 2011, Altibox was the first operator in Norway to create a TV Everywhere solution, offering live TV and VOD services across multiple screens to its customers. The Altibox Chill service delivers content in several different profiles to PCs, Macs and iOS devices using adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming in HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Smooth Streaming formats. With Agama, Altibox now has support to ensure that its OTT services works optimally 24/7.

“Agama has proven to be a reliable service quality assurance partner to us over the years, and after evaluating a number of OTT video service monitoring solutions on the market it was quite a simple selection to make,” says Eivind Østerli, Head of Customer Operations at Altibox. “With this extension of the Agama solution, we can easily connect and compare quality information for both OTT and multicast playout with QoE on set-top boxes in our network through the central Agama Enterprise Server. We hope to be able to quickly find any problematic sources that can affect either just one or both of the service platforms, to ensure that our services work well regardless of where and on which screen the customers choose to make use of them.”

Building out its existing Agama DTV Monitoring Solution, Altibox gathers monitoring information from all Agama Analyzers and Agama Embedded Monitoring probes for both IPTV and OTT video delivery into one single system. Leveraging Agama’s state-of-the-art analysis engine to perform powerful QoE and QoS monitoring of ABR streaming services, the solution provides top-level alarms, dashboard widgets and service status over views, as well as drill-down features with detailed metrics and extensive event logs down to each individual session. This will provide Altibox with awareness and understanding of problems and their impact on the end customers’ TV experience.

“We are proud to be given this reinforced trust from Altibox, an operator on the cutting edge – both in terms of technology, as well as in customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty,” says Mikael Dahlgren, CEO at Agama Technologies. “Our proven solution is ideal for all TV operators moving to multiscreen and TV Everywhere offerings, allowing OTT services to be concurrently monitored together with traditional TV services – all in a single and unified system.”

At stand 4.A55 at IBC2012 in Amsterdam, September 7-11, Agama will showcase live end-to-end monitoring set-ups for multi-platform video delivery and multiscreen environments, and present the cutting edge in video service quality assurance for IP, cable and OTT.

Categories: Press Releases, Test & Monitor