In Broadcast September 2012 - 64

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 12 - SEPTEMBER 2012

InTEST
Mediaproxy Evolution From Compliance Monitoring
In just over a decade, broadcast logging has evolved from carrying out a narrow compliance role to covering a much broader range of monitoring and revenue generating capabilities for broadcasters, cable and satellite companies. At IBC, Mediaproxy previewed the company’s new LogServer IP, providing a compelling demonstration of how far logging technology has come. “The advances we have made have turned loggers into highly diverse appliances for broadcasters, covering far more territory than their original mandate,” said Erik Otto, CEO of Mediaproxy. “LogServer IP is the next generation of logging and is ready to cater to an even wider range of applications in the 64 broadcast chain.” Before the transition to digital tools, broadcasters relied on VHS long-play tape recorders to log their transmissions. The process was simply a tedious requirement, providing limited value beyond regulatory compliance. On top of that, image quality was poor, and reviewing and managing tapes were time-consuming processes. In 2001, Mediaproxy introduced LogServer, one of the ﬁrst digital compliance loggers. Today, hundreds of broadcasters around the world are recording thousands of channels using Mediaproxy’s technology for a wide range of SDI and analogue content. What

LogPlayer Screenshot

was once legislated overhead has evolved into a sophisticated tool for monitoring and monetising. “Once people started using our LogServer platform they immediately saw opportunities for a range of value-added applications in their businesses,” said Otto. “They could use it to conﬁrm that ads had run properly, validating sales to advertisers. Operations managers could respond in an instant to fault reports. It began to change their business.”

faster networking infrastructure,” explained Otto. “That opened things up signiﬁcantly for broadcasters.”

LogServer ASI
The LogServer ASI, introduced by Mediaproxy in 2009, represented the second generation of digital logging and recorded content directly from ASI-based transmission sources, directly accessing the MPEG transport stream. This allowed broadcasters to monitor, review and analyse native transmissions, and to store them on the same cost-effective local storage array in parallel with their proxy media. Engineers could now review native transmissions from the past few days to complete technical forensics to improve their services. QoS monitoring, whether live or ofﬂine, provided seamless review from local and remote locations. “With the introduction of our LogServer ASI, network broadcasters, cable and satellite companies and IPTV providers could now continuously capture and monitor their actual transmissions as they go to air in parallel to their proxy compliance media,” explained Otto. “This provided customers with a path to true compliance, since baseband is not the transmission format. Also being able to perform ASI playout for sections of interest directly from the

Digital Logging
With LogServer, media recorded from baseband sources is essentially encoded, proxy-size media. Though this met the requirements of content compliance and covered some quality assurance, it did not offer an easy way to enhance quality of service (QoS) of the actual transmission or to access the metadata available in the original transport stream (TS). The cost of storage was relatively high and it was not realistic to retain 30 to 90 or more days of native transmissionquality video and audio as required by regulators. In addition, network connections were not always fast enough for larger file sizes. “Moore’s Law over time gave us faster hardware, larger capacity servers and storage, and

LogServer 2RU

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