Surveyor
ABR & TSABR streaming and transport stream
QoE & QoS monitoring
Video Quality Monitoring & Analytics by Telestream iQ
The Surveyor family offers solutions that will meet your QoS monitoring needs, whether you are dealing with Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) streaming or traditional linear broadcast video delivery, or both at the same time. Surveyor solutions can be targeted at the core, edge, or access region of both managed and unmanaged networks. In ABR streaming networks, they are well-suited for helping to establish and track Content Delivery Network (CDN) Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Surveyor™ ABR Passive
Surveyor ABR Passive consists of three separate products — Publishing, Intra-CDN, and End Client. Surveyor ABR Passive offers insights into the complex solutions and various networks used to deliver adaptive bitrate video. By monitoring at multiple demarcation points in the network, S-ABR Passive collects context-specific metrics, calculates performance based on multiple dimensions, and when necessary, raises alarms to alert you of critical events for further investigation. S-ABR Passive provides publishing validation in the head end, and monitors post-origin for 24×7 coverage of streaming assets, plus providing end client monitoring of user sessions and cache performance. Unlike solutions that rely on streaming the content for measurement, S-ABR Passive monitors without drawing on critical resources required to serve client devices.
Surveyor™ ABR Active
You need to assure that all of your adaptive bitrate (ABR) content — each and every bit rate rendition of every program — is available 24/7/365, and is able to be delivered with the required quality to provide a pristine viewer experience. You want to know that your content origin is operating within its performance envelope, and want to be sure that your delivery networks, including third-party CDNs, are performing to your expectations. You may even want the ability to deploy this solution across cloud-based infrastructure, and spin test nodes up and down as your needs demand.
Surveyor ABR Active is the right solution for you. It creates a synthetic client by requesting the video content, allowing for rapid fault detection and troubleshooting. Our proprietary VeriStream metric provides a color-coded at a glance QoS status for each and every video segment of each stream, giving you the intelligence needed to manage your 3rd party and unmanaged networks. Available in both appliance and licensable/virtualizable software formats, Surveyor ABR Active can be used standalone, or as part of a multi-element video quality assurance platform through the use of iQ Video Management solutions such as iVMS ASM and cVOC. Surveyor ABR Active is available in appliance-based, virtualized software and cloud-based formats.
Surveyor™ ABR Active Compact
Surveyor ABR Compact (ABRc) Active is a video quality monitoring solution that uses “synthetic client” technology to verify that your video content — live or VoD — is available and plays as expected, in every bitrate and format. It effectively acts as your most critical viewer, measuring video flows and keeping you informed about your service’s performance. Simply point Surveyor ABRc at the assets you want to monitor, and it continuously “plays” or cycles through the video to measure key performance indicators (KPIs). Surveyor ABRc Active is an integral component to IneoQuest’s ABR monitoring solution. Its small footprint and monitoring capacity is ideal for monitoring the access network and video assets that need attention by identifying issues before your customers are impacted.
Surveyor™ TS
High Density, Real-Time QoS Monitoring for IP MPEG Transport Streams
If you need to monitor the quality of 1G links or 10G links carrying hundreds or thousands of video transport streams, the Surveyor TS (Transport Stream) is your solution. Surveyor TS helps you understand your network’s performance in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, and quickly detects, identifies, and resolves problems that could impact a significant number of viewers.
In addition to supporting the CableLabs Distributed CCAP (Converged Cable Access Platform) Remote-PHY links, the Surveyor TS supports unicast, multicast, and broadcast streams for video encoded in MPEG2, MPEG4, AVC and HEVC. It offers the iQ-developed, industry-recognized Media Delivery Index (MDI) metric (RFC 4445) to identify packet jitter and delay tolerance boundaries.
Surveyor TS continuously monitors up to 20 Gbps of video traffic at line rate and in real time, measuring, trending and alarming on the TR 101 290 (priority 1,2, and 3) and QoS metrics for up to 2000 programs. Surveyor TS provides per-program availability metrics. It’s designed to locate transport impairments as they happen and produce actionable insights that allow you to address issues before they impact the customer viewing experience.
Surveyor TS can be used standalone, integrated into a service provider owned network management system using the control and data extract API, or as part of a multi-element video quality assurance platform using iQ Video Management such as iVMS. Surveyor TS is available in both appliance-based and virtualized software formats.
Surveyor™ TS Compact (TSc)
If you need similar functionality as the Surveyor TS but would like it in a more compact portable profile, the Surveyor TS Compact (TSc) is your ideal solution. Perfect for medium capacity monitoring, the Surveyor TSc offers scalable MPEG-2 Transport Stream measurement of up to 2 Gbps of video traffic—and up to 500 programs/128K PIDs, sized ideally for edge/access applications.