Bridge Technologies has introduced a quality monitoring solution that provides an extensive set of data gathering tools designed to deliver exceptional insights into the performance of content production, contribution and distribution networks.

Bridge Technologies’ new Integrated Services Monitoring (ISM) is an easy-to-install, turnkey solution that enables a unique, pre-integrated approach to the most complex tasks facing modern broadcast engineers, technicians and operators – monitoring.

ISM watches with automated eyeballs on all acquisition, delivery and production media streams, avoiding complex customization because it’s from a single vendor. It’s built for daily engineering operations and for managers to oversee and assess the overall performance of the operation.

The ISM approach to quality monitoring addresses the many layers of the broadcast and media cycle, including signal acquisition, production, contribution streams, OTT/streaming media, traditional OTA broadcasting by DTT or satellite, and archiving.

Compressed or Full Bandwidth

“ISM provides exactly the set of data gathering tools broadcasters need throughout the chain – from production to delivery, uncompressed to compressed.” said Simen K. Frostad, Chairman, Bridge Technologies. “No other company in the network monitoring and analysis space can offer such a complete, comprehensive set of automated capabilities that deliver such a high level of understanding throughout any content distribution chain.”

ISM is a complete media monitoring system that spans the entire media chain. It supports SD, HD, UHD and 8K, and contribution streams using various encapsulation techniques including TS-encapsulated JPEG2K and SRT in addition to traditional IPTV.

ISM embraces the modern headend with signal acquisition from terrestrial and satellite sources, and it includes pre-demodulation signal analytics, pre- and post-encoding analytics for IPTV, cable delivery and Remote PHY. It also monitors pre- and post-transcoding to origin for OTT distribution using QoE parameters such as MOS scores. All data is recorded for instant retrieval in an easy to use visual timeline or automatically generated and emailed in PDF reports.

“Integrated Services Monitoring represents the accumulation of our 15+ years of experience in developing, manufacturing and deploying the most advanced solutions to ensure the maximum uptime of content production, contribution and distribution networks around the world,” Frostad continued. “From the network engineer on a remote site to personnel at the master control room (MCR) who need visibility into everything that’s going on to management who require SLAs and other insightful indicators of overall network performance, Integrated Services Monitoring is there to deliver what they need, when they need it.”

More Useful Data

ISM illustrates Bridge Technologies’ approach to leveraging the inherent value of content data passing through the network. Once the data has been ‘acquired’ by a probe, it can be put to multiple uses.

“Take, for example, the VBC top level system as part of the ISM structure,” added Frostad. “It’s a management system that, by adding a single IP address to a remote probe, immediately starts the collection of massive amounts of data right into the database. That´s very powerful - suddenly all the advanced reporting and analysis comes automatically.”

Bridge Technologies’ product offerings range from embedded systems and software-based probes to software control systems that support all current commercially available standards and media formats. All are designed to deliver an in-depth, intuitive technical understanding of end-to-end broadcast content flow performance.

Bridge Technologies’ Widglets API for the VB440 probe allow video monitoring to be embedded within any HTML code, making it available to anyone connected with a web browser. The API is already allowing companies to achieve high-efficiency functionality in remote production that was previously unimaginable.