Telecom Italia Media Broadcasting Ensures a High Quality Viewing Experience With Tektronix Sentry

TIMB has deployed Sentry in its central headend and several other key locations in its network to monitor all of its high definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) programming to identify video and audio errors that can impact viewers’ quality of experience (QoE).  At its central headend facility in Rome where TIMB aggregates its programming content, Sentry is used to detect errors after the programming has been encoded and then again after it has been multiplexed – two critical steps where errors are likely to occur.   Sentry’s advanced detection capabilities enable TIMB to quickly diagnose errors and dramatically speed the time for repair.

“We have always been committed to delivering our programming with picture and sound quality as good as they can be, and deploying the Tektronix Sentry is the latest example of this ongoing commitment to quality,” said Crescenzo Micheli, TIMB’s chief technology officer.  “Sentry helps us quickly identify the root causes of video and audio errors across our entire channel line-up, which enables us to fix these errors faster than before.”

“Ensuring that viewers enjoy the best possible viewing experience is a constant effort and TIMB’s use of Sentry as part of its comprehensive approach to quality control demonstrates their commitment to being the best,” said Eric Conley, vice president, Video Network Monitoring, Tektronix.  “Sentry’s unmatched ability to identify video and audio errors anywhere in a network makes it an ideal solution for TIMB and other video service providers worldwide as they expand their services.”TIMB is just the latest company to use Sentry, which is the industry’s premier content monitoring solution and is proven in deployments with nine of the top 10 U.S. cable operators and three of the top five Canadian operators.

Sentry enables 24/7 real-time QoE monitoring of the entire channel line-up, as well as 60-day historical reporting.  This ability, coupled with its intuitive, programme-centric user-interface, enables the rapid identification, diagnosis, and repair of video and audio errors. In addition, Sentry features multi threshold-based alerting capability, which allows users to rapidly locate and solve those problems which have a noticeable impact on viewing quality.

Sentry is an award-winning, comprehensive content monitoring solution for cable, telecom, IPTV and other video service providers. Sentry enables the early detection, diagnosis and repair of video and audio errors (i.e., video freeze, macro-blocking, loss of audio, etc.) whenever or wherever they occur in the network, so service providers can deliver services with excellent quality, thus ensuring an optimal QoE for subscribers.  Sentry accomplishes this insight through its unique combination of an unprecedented visibility into network anomalies at the IP and MPEG layers, scalability to monitor every program in the network, and its real-time, 24/7 operation.

Telecom Italia Media Broadcasting

Telecom Italia Media Broadcasting (TIMB) is Italy’s third largest television broadcaster and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Telecom Italia, Italy’s largest telecommunications company.