In Broadcast - August 2014 - 70


I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 34 - AUGUST 2014

N E W S

InMEDIA

Keeping Tabs On Your Broadcast Service
How can you deliver on your contractually agreed Service Level Agreements and keep your
mission critical broadcast industry customers happy...

By Pete Griffiths
Director at Idonix

T

70

he broadcast industry, just like
any other, relies on timely and
reliable delivery of services. As
a provider of real-time graphics
for live television and the web, it
is essential that we manage our
services meticulously.
To ensure high standards are
maintained, some customers ask for
a service level agreement (SLA) as
part of their contract with us. There
are specialist software packages
on the market to help you measure
your agreed levels of performance,
but we have opted for a multifunctional network monitoring
tool. It's straightforward to set up,
enables us to report on our SLA
and also provides us with an up-tothe-minute picture of our growing IT
infrastructure.
We were ﬁrst asked to include an

SLA as part of an important contract
with one of our biggest customers,
the BBC, to create graphics for its
coverage of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
Given that we supply broadcastcritical systems for live television,
our service has to be available at all
times. It would be embarrassing if
our network failed and our customer
wasn't able to receive the product
we are supposed to deliver. However,
our customers are interested in
more than just availability. High
system performance, focussing on
quick loading times, is crucial for a
smooth service.
To help identify potential faults
and other issues that could result
in downtime, we installed Paessler's
PRTG Network Monitor to keep
tabs on our core server and our
customer's systems to measure
availability and performance. The
monitor produces metrics that
help us identify issues and ways to
improve service availability. It acts
as an early warning system as well
as a tool to give an accurate picture
of how our networks, and therefore
our services, are functioning

A multi-functional network monitoring tool provides reporting for the SLA

more broadly.
The metrics generated by the
monitor are scored against Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs),
which are central to any SLA.
Without them, your service can
be open to criticism and a blame
culture can develop. This enables
us to inform our customers of the
system's performance relative to the

metrics we agreed at the start of our
relationship.
Maintaining good customer
relations and trust, and providing
a great service, is key to
business success.
With the right tools, you can be
conﬁdent of delivering on your SLAs
and keeping your customers happy.

ClearView MOVIE - A Human Quality To Automated Quality Measurement
By Adam Schadle
VP of Video Clarity

V

ideo Clarity is a leading provider
of market-leading audio and
video quality measurement and
analysis systems.
We recently announced the
release of MOVIE for ClearView,
a new perceptual test method
for the ClearView line of video
quality analysers.
MOVIE (for Motion-based Video
Integrity Evaluation) creates a new
level of accuracy for measuring
video quality because it yields
results that are closer than ever to
human perceptions of video quality.
MOVIE improves accuracy for
content originators, broadcast
operators, broadcast transmission
equipment manufacturers, and
consumer electronics manufacturers
that use ClearView analysers to
ensure the best viewing experience,
operate more efﬁciently, meet SLAs,
and stay in compliance.
Though subjective viewing of
video to make ﬁnal product and

network-path quality decisions
will never go away, MOVIE
for ClearView analysers gives
discerning users in both R&D and
network operations departments a
new advanced measurement tool
that decreases the need for timeconsuming, subjective in-house
viewing and audience-based quality
assessment projects.
ClearView analysers use several
proven test methods to arrive at a
measurement of subjective quality
that very closely approximates what
the average person would see and
hear when watching the video.
Adding the full-reference MOVIE test
to ClearView systems gives users
the highest correlation to human
subjective quality available in an
automated measurement system.
Our customers are continually
looking for better, more accurate
ways to measure and track video
quality, whether they're developing
an encoder/decoder or other

quality artefacts. We
know users want the
MOVIE method as part
of their video quality
measurement and
test routines.
The science of
predicting
human
perception of video
quality is not 100%
accurate. The higher the
correlation to subjective
data sets, the better.
MOVIE provides a
closer correlation than
most available methods
because it takes into
account the spatial
and temporal changes
from frame to frame
that affect quality. With
MOVIE for ClearView moves closer to human
MOVIE, ClearView
video perceptual evaluation
systems will include a
metric measurement that
processing product, or running an
estimates frame-to-frame effects on
entertainment network processingquality, thereby addressing a demand
path application.
for higher accuracy as correlated
We study the latest work by
with well-known subjective data sets
researchers so that we can integrate
that use the recommended ITU-R
the best-performing solutions into
BT.500 method.
ClearView products. MOVIE meets
the demand for ever more accurate
We will demonstrate MOVIE for
tools when testing both broadcast
ClearView analysers at IBC2014. If
and consumer devices that tend
you're in Amsterdam, we hope you'll
to generate signiﬁcant interframe
come by to check it out.
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