TV Monitoring Services – Making Sure the Quality of Headend Feeds are Good

With an increase in the number of channels on TV broadcasting systems, changing types of media, and a need to reduce the cost of operation, TV broadcast monitoring has become more challenging. TV broadcasters need to immediately know when their content feeds are experience quality issues or loss of signal conditions. Tom Tucker explained to me at the NAB 2010 trade show that to provide automatic feed monitoring, IneoQuest has developed a frame capturing system (FrameGrabber) that continually evaluates the content quality at the headend and immediately reports when feed quality falls such as video signal loss, audio signal loss, black screen, freeze frame. To setup this system, the TV broadcaster simply connects the feed to a FrameGrabber and provides a few settings and monitoring begins and alerts can be provided by email or SNMP messages. The FrameGrabber can even provide thumbnail views of content feeds on a web browser.