IPTV Technology Featured Article

IPTV providers get a sigh of relief through Shenick’s (News - Alert) enhanced black screen error and audio cut-out detection solution

 

Shenick Network Systems, a company that offers per-flow IP communication test and monitoring systems, today announced that it’s upgrading its IPTV (News - Alert) performance monitoring and service assurance solution, “servicEye.”

 

The solution is designed to help IPTV providers detect black screen failure and audio cut out in a very short time, according to Shenick officials.

 

Detecting video and audio errors quickly means that IPTV providers can reduce customer churn and prevent revenue loss, company officials say. Shenick will display the features of upgraded servicEye at CommunicAsia (News - Alert), a trade show being held in Singapore this week, according to the company.

 

IPTV service providers find it challenging to differentiate between black images on a black background as part of regular viewing and genuine black screen error, as in black screen failure, the screen shows no image, according to the company, as opposed to audio cut out, viewers can see images but there’s no sound. The end users of IPTV expect assured quality of experience, and real time, fast interactive responsiveness by the providers at the time of a problem, the same that they are habitual of receiving with their standard TV services, company officials say.

 

But black screen failure or audio problems often take hours to detect and fix, according to the company, and providers are afraid that their customer might get annoyed and even switch to alternate TV service providers due to these problems.

 

Steve Hawley, a senior IPTV analyst with the Multimedia Research Group, said that IPTV service providers are under pressure to meet end users’ quality expectations with compelling content if they are to realize the promise of added revenues and subscriber loyalty. According to Hawley, it’s particularly challenging to discriminate between the content and the errors, when the video consists of silhouettes on a nearly black background, or if there are audio-only cut-outs.

 

Robert Winters, chief marketing officer at Shenick, said that the IPTV service providers often say that black screen detection can takes hours to detect and results in extremely frustrated customers, and the same applies for audio cut out too.

 

Winters said that with servicEye, Shenick has discovered a way to reliably cut black screen error detection down to seconds and reduce the number of false positives, and it’s vital to keep the technical errors to a minimum and reduce operations overhead when there is an error, in order to continue the successful adoption of IPTV.