Broadcast Service Quality Monitoring Strategies

Today's digital television broadcast systems are quite complex. The systems range from single station operations to large, centralized station groups. The ultimate goal of the broadcaster is to provide a quality viewing experience for the customer. Monitoring service quality throughout the broadcast system is therefore a necessary activity. — For DTV content, video packets must be delivered on time, in-order and compliant with MPEG and ATSC standards. The “correctness” of a broadcast DTV “flow” is critical to ensure that all viewers will be able to watch the content. Unfortunately, these standards are quite complex and at times impossible to completely adhere to. Without the appropriate care, monitoring systems can result in an overwhelming number of alarms (most for unimportant non-compliance), which tend to obscure any real problems that exist. — The ATSC Recommended Practice on Bitstream Verification (A/78) has provided a methodology for filtering these alarms. Significant emphasis was placed on practical considerations that might impact the use of MPEG monitoring equipment, including suitable categorization of error conditions to avoid operator fatigue and placing more emphasis on errors that would directly impact the viewer. The resulting RP gives a common methodology that has been designed with real-world use considerations, which can significantly reduce the time required to address faults. — To match the complexities of centralized broadcast operations, distributed monitoring systems have emerged that allow monitoring of various points within the distribution system and consolidation of the metrics in meaningful forms. Approaches and strategies for applying distributed monitoring to the broadcast architectures will be discussed - using Tiling as an example. — Digital terrestrial broadcast signals are often cross-carried into other infrastructures, for example Cable. Often, there are business or contractual agreements on what modifications may be made to the signal, in terms of quality, services and components. Auditing compliance with these agreements in an automated fashion has been quite difficult in the past. New techniques for carriage auditing will be discussed in this presentation which will allow a broadcaster to understand what (if any) modifications have been made to their signal as it is incorporated into another system.

Published

2009-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M001347

ISBN

978-1-61482-943-0