Remote TV Program Monitoring – Capturing and Analyzing Video at Customer Locations

Seeing exactly what your TV viewer sees can be a valuable tool in maintaining customer satisfaction and key diagnostic tool for network monitoring. During the IBC trade show, Julius Perl from Volicon described that TV broadcasters can install automatic remote program monitor (RPM) devices that can capture and return media at the output of the receiving device (the output of the STB). These devices can capture exactly what the viewer sees. With some added intelligence in this remote monitoring device, the TV broadcaster can be alerted for a variety of conditions (via email or SNMP) such as degraded video quality (macroblocking), loss of signal (LOS), low audio levels, and other indicators of performance changes. RPMs can also be used to maintain logs of ad insertions. Because RPMs are added after the viewers device, no client software installations in STBs are required.