In Broadcast - September 2014 - 80

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

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 35 - SEPTEMBER 2014

N E W S

InFILE

Assessing Quality At IBC2014

On a recent tour of BBC Archives, the problem with relying on humans for
quality assurance became abundantly clear...

By Kieron Seth
Contributing Editor

A

80

s the 1974 party political
broadcasts and endless
televised sermons delivered by
dusty Church of England clerics are
digitised and archived, it is the job
of a despairing BBC QA operator
to watch and approve every newly
recorded hour.
While programmes that have
enduring appeal - rundowns of
the music charts, cup finals or
momentous news reports - may
be given a thorough examination,
there are thousands of hours of
banal programming that cannot
possibly hold the attention of even
the most eager technician.
The BBC, like every archive,
has to quality check every clip
and production that it places into
archive. Can technology ever
replace the eyeball for QC, and fully
relieve the burden on beleaguered
QC technician?
"No, not totally," says Steve Nunney,
MD of Hamlet. "Who is going to
spot the wrong language, the wrong
caption, the wrong background on
the end titles?"
But are we actually asking the
wrong question entirely? In this
age of mobile phone reportage
and consumer production, is quality
checking a necessity at all? In short,
will the rise of YouTube mean
broadcasters will relax technical
quality guidelines?
"Who knows?" responds Nunney.
"The basic current speciﬁcations date
back to analogue days - it's timely
for a refreshing look at this issue for
sure." Indeed, he is quick to point
out a counter argument. He suggests
that as many home users were more
than content with VHS recordings,
it could be argued that some of the
amateur HD content uploaded to the
Internet is considerably better, by a
"huge multiple".
While technology will always
be just one part of the quality

Snell remote monitoring with Hyperion

assurance armoury, it's a critical
piece of that workflow. And it's
just as innovative as the more
glamourous links in the chain.
Indeed, Snell's signal assurance
and intelligent monitoring solution
answers an emerging issue for many
broadcasters: how to maintain highquality video and audio output
when repeatedly processing media
for delivery to multiple platforms,
services and locations.
This video and audio processing
often puts sound and visual
elements out of sync, particularly
where it occurs through different
workflows. As part of its signal
assurance and monitoring
proposition, Snell provides an
innovative lip sync solution, using
biometric data transmitted with the
signal, that works quickly (typically
detecting within two-seconds) and
accurately to ﬁnd and correct those
disconnects even within difﬁcult
sequences containing slow motion,
allowing broadcasters to further
automate their monitoring workflows.

processing many times faster than
other cloud QC solutions running
on similar hardware - leading to
signiﬁcant cost-savings.
Sharing the pay per use model is
Venera's Pulsar Pay-Per-Use (PPU),
a new addition to its PulsarTM
automated ﬁle-based QC system.
It will launch at IBC2014. Pulsar is
a ﬁle-based automated QC system
designed to automate content QC
seamlessly at various stages in the
content workﬂow, such as ingest,
archive, and playout. The Pay-PerUse offering is particularly attractive
for users who don't want to make
an upfront investment.
Venera's goal is to combine the
flexibility of the cloud solution
with the security of an on-site
system. Pulsar PPU gives users
the tools to perform quality checks
at every stage of the content life
cycle. Users can perform complex
checks for issues such as digital hits,
blockiness, or ﬁeld-dominance, as
well as analyse media to make sure
it is compliant with regulations and
standards such as the DPP, Netﬂix,
EBU R128, or the CALM Act. Pulsar
includes a wide range of technical
parameter checks at the container
level - MXF, transport streams,
QuickTime - and audio/video level
that are essential to verifying legality.
"The Pulsar PPU system is installed

Tektronix QCloud jobs monitor

Cloud QC

Tektronix's QCloud QC solution is
for ﬁle-based workﬂows running
on a cloud infrastructure. It is
designed to meet the QC needs of
the production, post-production,
broadcast and online video service
market segments that operate ﬁlebased workﬂows. As a virtualised
service, it offers scalable and ondemand features, helping users
reduce upfront capital expenses
and minimise support costs.
Vidcheck has followed suit with
its Vidchecker-cloud. As a pay-peruse system, it can be automatically
started or shut down to allow
dynamic sizing of the QC system
to match demand. The company
claims that it can provide QC

locally in the user's facility, and all
analysis is performed locally. By
maintaining content on-site, the
user also can depend on existing
security measures to protect the
content. And, because content never
moves outside the facility, users
do not need to install additional
network infrastructure," said
Fereidoon Khosravi, Senior Vice
President of Business Development
- Americas, at Venera.
Another cloud-focused enterpriselevel monitoring vendor, Q'ligent
is attending IBC to demonstrate
how its Vision solution extends
the reach of media quality analysis
for linear TV - all while minimising
costs and infrastructure due to its
lightweight, intelligent architecture.

Various checks from Venera Pulsar

Its aim is to help broadcasters
and network operators to improve
Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality
of Experience (QoE) for consumers
via comprehensive media analysis,
with insight into signal integrity and
performance up to the point of signal
delivery to consumers.

Ted Korte,
COO, Q'ligent

"...Critical media
quality analysis
of their channel
distribution, across
multiple delivery
platforms, onto a
single user interface

"

"Broadcasters and network
operators are spread increasingly
thin as they manage an
exponentially growing number of
headends and delivery platforms,"
explained Q'ligent COO Ted Korte.
"They simply do not have enough
resources to allocate across
divergent systems, and need to
get to the root of system issues
faster. We're giving our customers
an intuitive and limitless service that
centralises all critical media quality
analysis of their channel distribution,
across multiple delivery platforms,
onto a single user interface."

Digimetrics Aurora provides
automated ﬁle-based QC
CONTINUED ON PAGE 82

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Phillip&last=Izzard&search=Go https://twitter.com/inbroadcast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpzEatLsHdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.facebook.com/InBroadcast http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/inbroadcast/id468652679?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.branded.inbroadcast&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5icmFuZGVkLmluYnJvYWRjYXN0Il0. http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.veneratech.com/ http://uk.tek.com/file-based-qc/qcloud http://www.digi-metrics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=102&Itemid=499 http://www.snellgroup.com/products/control-and-monitoring/signal-protection/hyperion

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