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Live Monitor is a unified end-to-end system that analyzes and informs video quality evaluation at scale using automation.
Stop worrying about quality drop-offs and high operational costs. Live Monitor fully automates your QA process with the only quality metric that is correlated to human vision so that it can trace your video quality throughout its distribution.
A few ways Live Monitor ensures a consistent viewing experience:
- Guards against the degradation of video quality across the network.
- Increase efficiency of your video operations and reduce overhead costs.
- System wide QA automation.
Correlated real-time monitoring of every distribution function that can impact video quality.
Independently monitor and evaluate all active encoders and transcoders.
Live Monitor uses computationally efficient software-based probes to monitor content quality at all points in the video distribution and streaming pipeline, including:
- Source validation for Linear Channels and Events.
- Encoding performance and packaging validation.
- Quality of Delivery and Viewer Experience monitoring across all demarcation points.
- Content delivery and Playback monitoring.
Achieving cost-effective QA at scale is hard.
Live Monitor isn’t just another lab tool. It gives you a unified end-to-end system that analyzes and informs status of the viewer experience regardless of delivery method and display in use. When you consider the high operational cost of QA tools and that most do not correlate well to human vision, a quality assurance system that scales reliably is essential.
Live Monitor was built to address the QA needs of every video service.
You will enjoy unified and end-to-end monitoring of Viewer Scores, QoS, and regulatory compliance tracking across your full workflow with Live Monitor.
Live Monitor delivers viewer-first real-time monitoring of input and output video quality including audio at every stage of the delivery ecosystem. It provides a clear view of potential problems including root causes, frequency and solutions even before subscribers notice them.
Dig deep dashboards.
Complex algorithms and big data visually presented so that executives and video operations teams can make better informed decisions.
How Live Monitor compares to other tools.
| Product Capability | Other Tools in the Market | Live Monitor | Solutions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Optimized alerts | No | Yes | Live Monitor aggregates and correlates alerts across streams, location, path, monitoring point into one single alert to unburden NOC/OPS. |
| 2 | The most accurate perceptual quality metric | No | Yes | Live Monitor processes each pixel for accurate perceptual quality assessment. |
| 3 | Root cause delineation | No | Yes | Live Monitor offers single-pane correlated view between multiple streams, monitoring points, and redundancy paths to identify the cause. |
| 4 | Scale of impact & fault localization | Partially | Yes | Live Monitor offers operational and alerting intelligence that quickly helps identify the scale of impact on customers. |
| 5 | Super search (search and sort) | No | Yes | Live Monitor has the most flexible search engine that allows users to find information with the least number of clicks. |
| 6 | Latency between monitoring points | No | Yes | Live Monitor computes latency across any two points in a delivery chain. |
| 7 | Audio/video lip sync | No | Yes | Live Monitor detects video lip sync issues. |
| 8 | Uniform viewer score at all stages | No | Yes | Live Monitor is the only tool in the industry that provides uniform scoring for any device, network, and stage across a content delivery chain. |
Why video services use Live Monitor.
Live Monitor offers real-time monitoring of the network while tracking and evaluating all encoders and transcoders to ensure consistent end user video quality at the device level.
Operational Benefits
Live Monitor enables you to deliver consistently better video experiences without increasing your operational costs or introducing unwanted technical complexity. Live Monitor provides a complete solution to Quality of Delivery, Viewer Experience, and Compliance Monitoring.
Using Live Monitor you can:
- Root cause and fix issues at scale across a delivery chain faster than ever before using best-in-class Operational Intelligence platform
- Monitor and compare viewer experiences over a variety of delivery methods or workflow segments.
- Measure and trace viewer experience with the only objective quality metric that is aligned with human vision.
Business Operations
Live Monitor connects to your Live video workflow and operationalizes viewer experience data to remove the guesswork and inconsistency from manual QC and validation steps. By plugging into the content creation, contribution, distribution, and delivery steps, your quality assurance function may be scaled beyond non-metric-based processes so that you can deliver a reliable quality of experience to your distributors and subscribers.
Using Live Monitor you can:
- Reduce churn by understanding empirically how video quality and UX impact subscriber behavior.
- Validate source quality to ensure that you are meeting SLAs and delivering the best viewer experience.
Live Monitor Versions
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Description | Automated Quality of Delivery Monitoring at Scale with Optimized Mean Time to Resolution | Trace Viewer Experience from Content Creation to Consumption at Scale with Optimized Alerting | Video Experience Automation using cutting edge metrics to locate and resolve the most challenging issues in real-time |
| Top Features |
|
|
|
| Recommended for | Tier 1 and Tier 2 Operations teams primarily focused on content delivery | All tiers of content operations and technology teams | Content Operations, Technology, and Data teams |
Live Monitor Detailed Features
Data resolution
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 second real-time data | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| 1 minute historical data | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Data retention
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 second real-time data granularity | 30 min | 30 min | 30 min |
| 1 minute historical data granularity | 30 days | 90 days | 1 year |
Operational Intelligence
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default dashboards and reports | 4 | 6 | 10 |
| Custom dashboards and reports | 0 | 5 | 10 |
| Custom dashboard development time (hrs) | 0 | 10 | 40 |
| Insights Platform UI access | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Insights User accounts | 0 | 4 | 10 |
| Scheduled reports | – | ✔ | ✔ |
Signal Interfaces
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
|---|---|---|---|
| MPEG-TS over Multicast or Unicast | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| HLS | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| DASH | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| SMPTE 2110 & SMPTE 2022-6 | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| SDI | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| HDMI | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| HDMI with channel change | – | – | ✔ |
| Zixi | – | – | ✔ |
| SRT | – | – | ✔ |
Video attributes
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SD | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| HD | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| UHD | – | ✔ | ✔ |
Codecs
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All commonly used video and audio codecs | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Delivery Metrics
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| ETR-101-290 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Quality of Delivery | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Network, transport, and streaming protocol metrics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Elementary stream metrics | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Perceptual Video Metrics
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| SSIMPLUS Viewer Score | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| Encoder Performance Score | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| No-reference SSIMPLUS Viewer Score | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| Macroblocking | – | – | ✔ |
Other Metrics
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| Audio | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Closed captions | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| SCTE monitoring | – | ✔ | ✔ |
Content Behavior Validation
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| Video freeze | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Audio loudness level | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Video latency | – | – | ✔ |
| Audio/video sync | – | – | ✔ |
Visual validation
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| Thumbnail wall for all services | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Thumbnails for all streams | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| Content captures | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| Multiviewer for post-STB monitoring | – | – | ✔ |
Alerts
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| Stream alerts | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Service alerts | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| SNMP traps | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Slack and email based alerting | – | – | ✔ |
API/Data Integrations
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| Configuration REST API | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Data REST API (queries/hr) | 1 | 5 | 10 |
| Data REST API (records/hr) | 500 | 5,000 | 50,000 |
| Data streaming integration | – | – | ✔ |
| API based alerts | – | ✔ | ✔ |
Support
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| Hours | 8/5 | 8/7 | 24/7 |
| Response time SLA | 1 day | 1 hour | 15 mins |
Maximum streams per monitoring point
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| 5 | 8 | 15 |
Redundant Paths
| Professional | Advanced | Master | |
| – | – | ✔ |
Automate your QA and stop worrying about quality drop-offs, and high operational cost so that you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes from the only end-to-end solution that works across broadcast, OTT streaming, and cable workflows.
Technical Specifications
System requirements
SSIMPLUS Live Monitor is a software-based solution that deploys on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. Run a single instance on a single server or scale to multiple instances on a cluster with database redundancy and geo-diverse deployment.
- Operating systems: CentOS, Redhat
- Virtual machines: VirtualBox, VMWare
- Containers: Docker
- Internet access for centralized data platform
Supported input formats
| Uncompressed formats |
|
| Compressed formats |
|
| ABR | HLS DASH-IF DASH-CIF CMAF Parsing and reporting of SCTE-35 messages |
| HDR | HLG & PQ for HEVC/AVC SMPTE ST 2110-20 |
Supported codecs
| Video codecs | H.264/AVC H.265/HEVC MPEG-2 |
| Audio codecs | AAC HE-ACC HE-ACC v2 Dolby Digital (AC-3) Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC-3) Dolby Atmos MPEG-2 (L1, 2, 3) MPEG-1 PCM Audio over SDI/HDMI/ST 2022-6* IEC61937 (AC-3 over HDMI) *SMPTE ST 2022-6 Audio support for interlaced content only |
Supported video, audio and compliance metrics
| Perceptual video metrics | Target Display Device Adaptive SSIMPLUS Viewer Score for TV, Tablet, Phone, Monitor, and Laptop Encoder Performance Score No-reference SSIMPLUS Viewer Score Macroblocking |
| Delivery metrics | ETSI TR 101 290 QoD Network, transport, and streaming protocol metrics Elementary stream metrics |
| Content behaviour validation | Video freeze Audio loudness level Video latency Audio/video sync |
| Visual validation | Thumbnail wall for all services Thumbnails for all streams Content captures Multiviewer for post-STB monitoring |
| Audio | QoD True Peak Loudness measurement Integrated Loudness measurement Short term measurement Momentary loudness measurement |
| Closed Captions (CEA-608/CEA-708) | Quality of Experience (Measures abnormalities in presentation and display of captions)
Quality of Delivery (Measures abnormalities in control commands and packet processing) |
| HLS Metrics | HTTP Response Code counts for Manifests/Segments |
Ad insertion
|
Timing information QoE transitions Loudness transitions |
Actionable dashboards
| Flexible organizational levels | Create rich topology levels to organize your deployment
|
| Reporting | Report metrics at a Network and Region level Report metrics at a Market level Report metrics at a Service and Stream level |
| Settings & Configuration | Global settings Alert template configuration Server manager Support portal Help portal |
Get Live Monitor working for you
Download the product sheet or talk to a representative.
