In Broadcast - March 2012 - 59

ISSUE 6 - MARCH 2012 | WWW.INBROADCAST.COM

InREPLY
Johan Görsjö, Director of Product Management at Agama Technologies answers the InBroadcast questions
Johan Görsjö

InBroadcast: How is your company changing to meet client demands? Johan Görsjö: As a monitoring vendor today, you need to provide solutions supporting everything from operational eﬃciency and proactivity, all the way down to deepest technical insights and analyses. You also need to provide solid means for understanding and correlating several distribution chains within the same solution, to systematically visualise the service quality across a range of platforms to each single viewer as the operators’ world grows more complex. Agama is one of the few vendors already there, and we continue to deliver components that evolve our existing solution to adapt to the market’s new demands and needs. We have always had our focus on the quality assurance need for the whole operator organisation, with a strong focus on the value of QA for the operator and especially our customers’ customer – the viewer. With a lot of diﬀerent ways of reaching the viewers and a range of new complexity elements introduced with the turn towards more individual TV services and a more diversiﬁed consumer end, it becomes even more important

to understand and manage the QoS and QoE all the way out to the point of service consumption. This is what you can achieve with a complete system like the Agama DTV Monitoring Solution. InB: What criteria does the market use to make buying decisions for your products/services? JG: An investment in monitoring and quality assurance is really a strategic decision to raise service quality and by that reduce churn, increase customer satisfaction and increase eﬃciency of several internal processes, such as customer support and network operations. This makes Return On Investment (ROI) an important criteria when selecting a monitoring solution. Parts of such a calculation are how fast can the solution be implemented, what is the cost of integration (for instance training cost), and what processes can be made more eﬃcient by deploying it? We have seen some fairly remarkable cost reductions when customers have deployed our solution, including reductions in trouble resolution time from days to hours, cuts by 75 per cent of incoming ﬁrst line support calls, and truck rolls and unnecessary STB swaps almost reduced to zero. All of

this giving QA projects the quickest ROI we have seen in the industry. InB: Which territories are showing particular activity? JG: We see a tremendous interest in over-the-top (OTT) video distribution and the ‘TV Everywhere’ concept. This strong interest is shown both from traditional cable and broadcast operators, as well as telcos oﬀering IPTV. With this turn towards more individual TV services, the operator has to be able to eﬃciently manage, control and evaluate the QoS and QoE of the diﬀerent distribution platforms to customers consuming TV in very diﬀerent settings, all with their own potential problem sources. To achieve this understanding and to have the means for operational excellence in this complex environment, the operator will need a wide-ranged and massive monitoring solution in both scope and scalability. At last year’s IBC we presented products for monitoring and quality assurance in the OTT environment, and Agama is today the only vendor oﬀering a complete end-to-end solution covering OTT, cable and IPTV from head-end, through CDN, to the customer viewing device – all in one single system. InB: Any innovations ahead that you can discuss? JG: Please come by our stand 179 at the upcoming IP&TV World Forum in London, March 20–22. One very exciting thing we will be demonstrating is how to gain real-time understanding of service quality in all steps of the OTT delivery chain including the customer experience. InB: Tell us more about your products/technology/services in action? JG: By deploying an end-toend Agama solution the operator gains a real-time understanding of service quality in all steps of the delivery, from service creation to consumption. Multiple types of services, for instance cable TV and OTT services, can be handled in a single system, correlated with the Agama Enterprise Server, which

is our top umbrella system. This provides the operator with a solid platform to grow and supports them as they expand their service oﬀering. Customer experience monitoring is achieved through the Agama Embedded Monitoring Solution, which provides real-time QoE as well as QoS metrics from up to several millions of connected devices. These devices can be set-tops, media players in tablets or CPEs such as wireless video gateways or residential gateways. This gives detailed information on media quality and system health for individual devices and groups of devices, for instance all STBs connected to a certain DSLAM. By ﬁrst line support staﬀ having access to current and historical objective quality information for customers, their resolution time can be shortened and unnecessary truck rolls can be avoided. In the head-end, monitoring is done through the Agama Analyzer H-E, catching problems on all levels of the digital TV service; video and audio elementary stream, TS and IP or ASI. Problems such as black screen, freeze frames, silence and other content problems can be detected before they cause end customers to call in. In the network, Agama Analyzer NET (for IP) or Agama Analyzer eQAM (for cable) provides detailed technical metrics for hundreds of monitored channels, and supports troubleshooting activities such as triggered recording, in-depth service and log analysis. The monitoring information from the head-end and network can be directly correlated with data from the CPEs using the central Agama Enterprise Server, which of course shortens problem triangulation; which customers are affected, what service is aﬀected, where is the problem and how severe is it. This true end-to-end perspective really makes a diﬀerence – higher service quality translates to lower churn and lower operating costs for the operator. InB: Thank you for taking time out to talk to us. ■

59

Agama Technologies analysis and monitoring
http://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_tab_home_top http://www.twitter.com/inbroadcast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpzEatLsHdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player http://www.facebook.com/pages/InBroadcast-e-zine/226166444076212 http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/inbroadcast/id468652679?mt=8 http://WWW.INBROADCAST.COM http://www.agama.tv/
In Broadcast - March 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - March 2012
