[SatNews] Agama Technologies, providing video service quality assurance (QA), will be at stand 4.A71 at IBC2013 in September to present cutting-edge QA for OTT, IP, and cable video services. Agama will showcase live end-to-end monitoring set-ups for video distribution for multiplatform and multiscreen environments, and visitors to the stand can preview the upcoming Version 4.5 of the Agama DTV Monitoring Solution with all its latest developments and additions.
The Agama DTV Monitoring Solution is an industry-leading solution for continuous and real-time monitoring and QA of the end-to-end video delivery chain. It provides full transparency of the service distribution from pixel level in the head-end all the way through to what is experienced by the viewer. Trusted by TV operators worldwide, the solution supports business processes with actionable insights that help to proactively manage service quality and customer satisfaction, whilst lowering OPEX and improving customer retention. Ultimately, this empowers TV businesses with accelerated service growth and profitability, as well as with strengthened customer loyalty.
Embedded Monitoring for all OTT platforms
Agama’s QA client for Embedded Monitoring is now available for all major OTT platforms, such as iOS, Android, Silverlight, JavaScript (Smart TV/HTML5) and Flash. This enables operators to really understand the end-user quality experience and behaviour, regardless of the mix of end-devices, which is vital in today’s multiplatform world.
Highly relevant service usage and quality metrics are continuously and concurrently collected from the OTT clients, scalable to millions in real-time. No matter what type of client, the metrics are presented in an intuitive, unified and efficient manner to create operational transparency for service operation teams.
Monitoring information from the head-end encoding, the CDN edge-caches and the quality of the end-user experience, can be seamlessly integrated to create a full end-to-end understanding of the service quality. This helps operators to proactively resolve any issues before they impact on the customer base.
The Agama DTV Monitoring Solution can now better than ever support any combination of IP, cable and OTT video services, strengthening its position as a true multiscreen and multiservice capable QA solution.
MPEG-DASH support in Analyzer OTT
The Agama Analyzer OTT is a sophisticated adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming QA probe range for fully automated QoS/QoE monitoring and testing of over-the-top video services. With its combination of monitoring depth and breadth, concurrent capacity and ease of use, the Analyzer OTT is industry unique.
At IBC2013, Agama will present the latest edition of Analyzer OTT that now supports the MPEG-DASH ABR streaming technology standard, for active monitoring of MPEG-DASH manifests and segments. This is in addition to the already supported HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Smooth Streaming protocols. All protocols can be used concurrently in any combination.
Analyzer OMNIA
Agama recently launched Analyzer OMNIA – its latest cable TV monitoring probe with the market’s highest density and parallel capacity. Deployable in a slim form factor, it eliminates the need for round-robin monitoring.
With a unique combination of analysis depth and capacity, Analyzer OMNIA offers a vastly higher density of simultaneously monitored multiplexes compared to any other solution on the market today. It can monitor up to 48 muxes and all individual services, all in real-time, with complete TS analysis and full TR290 Prio 1–3 parameter set, scaling to multi-gigabit monitoring capacity.
OMNIA is optimised for use in cable operators’ head-ends, local offices or edge QAM sites. It allows even the largest cable networks to deploy single Analyzer probes capable of monitoring every mux and all their services in important network locations, instead of having to use dozens of probes for each network point to achieve the same coverage and level of concurrent monitoring.
Version 4.5 of Agama DTV Monitoring Solution
In addition to the highlights already presented, Agama is pleased to showcase the upcoming Version 4.5 at IBC2013, with enhancements across the complete product suite of the Agama DTV Monitoring Solution. This product line includes powerful head-end and network probes, as well as embedded monitoring for STBs, gateways and media players. Top-level end-to-end views in the central management systems make it possible to follow the QoE and QoS for services all the way from creation in the head-end to consumption for each individual viewer, as well as for groups of viewers. This allows operators to quickly identify, pinpoint, prioritise, resolve and prevent disturbances affecting the customers’ experience, satisfaction and loyalty.
In version 4.5, Agama introduces a new at-a-glance Worst Channels dashboard widget, showing the top problematic services as experienced by the consumers, as well as improvements in the Enterprise Server’s Timeline Correlation view, which shows monitoring correlation overviews intelligently aggregated by service or location. Improvements in v4.5 also include enhanced user interface performance, additional metrics available in the Performance Management application layer, new possibilities in OSS/BSS integration APIs to extract data about monitored devices, and much more.
