Mixed Signals, a company that specializes in digital content monitoring
technologies, has launched a product called Sentry Edge which it bills
as the cable industry's first comprehensive monitoring solution
designed specifically for scalable and cost-effective monitoring of
complex VOD and switched digital video (SDV) deployments. "With
its promise of freeing up substantial bandwidth, SDV is a strategic
initiative for operators, but it poses several challenges to ensuring
delivery of quality television service to subscribers," Mixed Signals
CEO, Eric Conley, said in a prepared statement. "After discussing these
concerns with leading operators over the past year, we developed
Sentry Edge to comprehensively monitor the critical aspects of an SDV
deployment to enable operators to quickly identify and rectify
problems, so they can free up bandwidth and preserve the best possible
experience for subscribers."
US operators are currently in various stages of deploying and testing
SDV, which involves the installation and integration of significant
amounts of new equipment, including edge QAM's, switch/routers,
servers and session resource managers, often from multiple vendors.
The interaction between these devices and the content flowing through
them can create operational issues, such as over-subscribed QAM's,
"channel not available" messages, and switching errors that cause the
wrong channel to be delivered to the end-user. According to Mixed
Signals, Sentry Edge has been designed for the increasingly complex
SDV environment: even in a multi-vendor environment, the company
says, the product not only reports on switching activities, providing
statistics on such things as bandwidth utilization; but also alerts
operators to critical SDV issues such as switching errors, bandwidth
oversubscription, and cross-content issues prior to distribution. The
company also claims that the product is designed to be scalable and
cost-effective, even as operators add service groups; that it features
unique design elements for SDV and VOD deployments; and that
operators can combine it with the Mixed Signals Sentry digital content
monitor and the company's Medius remote monitoring and
management system for a broader view of their network (note: in an
SDV architecture, operators deploy Sentry--which, Mixed Signals
stresses, "continues to be the company's flagship product"--at the
headend to identify anomalies in the network at the IP, MPEG and
content layers; according to the company, it is capable of identifying
hundreds of potential problems, including video freeze, video black and
the loss of single and multichannel audio).
