Volicon Observer at CABSAT 2009

Broadcasters and cable operators who face growing competitive pressure to convert to fully digital operations and provide high-definition offerings to discriminating viewers, are looking to improve the quality of service and viewing experience now more than ever.

The industry standard for video monitoring and logging, the Volicon Observer gives broadcasters a powerful competitive weapon that helps them to deliver the highest quality viewing experience possible. The Observer captures, stores, and indexes broadcast content from multiple channels, offering users simultaneous, 24/7 access to video from their desktop computers. The Observer brings new levels of efficiency to many critical broadcasting tasks, such as monitoring and troubleshooting transmissions, ensuring compliance, verifying advertising broadcasts, and tracking and analyzing viewer ratings and public relations information.

Products on display will include:

Observer 5.0

Driven by customer requirements, the Observer 5.0 offers a range of new features designed to provide operators greater flexibility and broader options in different content monitoring situations, including monitoring and recording of high-definition (HD) content. The system now enables operators to obtain closed captions from CEA-708 HD video streams through extraction of EIA-608 closed-caption data. Other new HD features include support for Dolby 5.1 and support of bit rates higher than 3.0 Mbps to enable improved monitoring of high-quality HD video.

The Content Export module, which enables batch and scheduled exporting, now provides support for exporting of closed-captioning data. In addition to email alerts, Observer 5.0 now has the added ability to generate alerts, triggered within Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) systems when SNMP traps are detected, including data about the fault and an embedded URL pointing directly to the offending clip.

With the Observer 5.0's support of custom language names for audio tracks, users will now be able to give names of their choosing to multiple audio streams assigned to each video channel. In addition, users can now also perform closed-caption searches by time period, set individual quality-of-service thresholds for each type of alarm, and place channels in a desired order in the user interface.

Observer QoE Module

With the new QoE quality-assurance/quality-of-experience module, the Observer is the industry's first video monitoring solution of its kind to provide an automated method for analyzing a video image to detect macroblocking, a process that traditionally has required human intervention to spot the on-screen anomalies.

The Observer QoE module was developed in cooperation with several major U.S. cable operators to quickly and reliably detect macroblocking, commonly known as "pixelization." The Observer QoE employs advanced patent-pending technology, developed by Volicon engineers, to analyze video content and alert the operator whenever macroblocks are detected. In addition, the Observer QoE notifies the operator when it detects other transmission faults including black video, frozen image, or low audio.

RPM 100

At CABSAT 2009, Volicon will demonstrate the RPM 100, a new entry-level version of the Observer RPM for automated, multichannel content and signal quality analysis. The RPM 100 is targeted to cable MSOs and station groups who need a cost-effective solution for monitoring and analyzing signal quality and consumer quality of experience (QoE) at geographically dispersed secondary headends and remote unmanned cable hubs. The RPM 100 is a single-port system that offers a subset of the core RPM functionality for monitoring the signal quality at remote locations. The RPM 100 can be set to monitor a single channel around the clock, or to continuously scan multiple channels.

When the system detects a video or audio fault such as black screen or low audio, it sends an automatic alert to the operator on duty for resolution. The RPM 100 also includes Volicon's new QoE module for automatic detection of macroblocking.