Symmetricom Tracks Video on the Fritz
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 1/13/2008 9:00:00 PM
LOS ANGELES – Symmetricom has a new way to let cable operators know if the video signals going into a subscriber’s TV set are acting screwy.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company, whose primary products provide timing-synchronization capabilities for telecommunications gear and other devices, has developed a system called V-Factor to monitor video and audio on cable networks, looking for various impairments. Symmetricom plans to launch the system here at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ Conference on Emerging Technologies.
According to Symmetricom board member Jim Chiddix, a longtime cable engineer whose career has included 15 years as Time Warner Cable’s chief technology officer, often the first indication there’s a problem with a video signal is when an irritated customer calls up to complain.
“Historically, there’s really been no feedback mechanism for video quality,” he said.
V-Factor includes a headend video analyzer that evaluates the quality and integrity of source video and detects encoding impairments. Then, it uses network probes and software agents that run on set-top boxes to compare the video delivered throughout the network with the source to determine if there are any problems. Other vendors pitching similar video-monitoring systems include Mixed Signals.
Chiddix, a Symmetricom board member, claimed the need for a system like V-Factor is growing as cable video-delivery networks become increasingly complex.
“With the advent of video on demand, and now switched digital video… there are lots of things that can go wrong and be degraded in different ways,” he said.
Joyce Kim, vice president of marketing Symmetricom’s quality of experience assurance division, said V-Factor filters its analysis through a “human vision” system: “We’ve done a comprehensive job of figuring out what impairments matter to a viewer.”
Symmetricom is introducing the system to the cable space after providing a similar solution for Internet Protocol TV monitoring to telcos, including two of Europe’s biggest providers, Telecom Italia and France Telecom.
V-Factor requires an “initial investment” of between $20,000 and $50,000, Kim said, adding that full-scale deployments would cost much more than that. The set-top client software may be installed on all subscriber boxes or just a sampling.
Symmetricom developed V-Factor based on technology from two acquisitions last year: Paris-based QoSmetrics and Genista, a video-quality measurement firm based in Singapore.
