Telos Alliance brand 25-Seven Systems recently announced a new Broadcast Watermark Analyzer & Monitoring solution called the TVC-15. The solution will be on display at the 2017 NAB Show.

Think of TVC-15 as a modulation monitor for watermarking. Stations in electronically measured markets can now independently detect, monitor, and analyze how well each element in their programming supports audio watermarking.

Measurements occur in real time, off-air, without connection to a watermark encoder. Every 400 milliseconds, TVC-15’s tone verification codec detects and analyzes the actual code symbols in any audio it is fed, whether yours, or any other encoding station in your market.

Standard analog inputs enable monitoring any source, live or recorded. A front-panel graph provides a granular, moment-by-moment display. Users can also download reports to verify encoding quality over hours, days and weeks. The TVC-15 is a tool for stations to independently verify the presence and relative quality of watermark tones embedded in programming.

"When we introduced Voltair two years ago, users asked if we could detect watermarks right off-air, or at any patch point. With TVC-15, now we can provide a complete, end-to-end picture of your and your competitors’ encoding,” said Geoff Steadman, founder of 25-Seven Systems.

TVC-15's proprietary algorithms constantly analyze the input signal, looking for valid code symbols that combine to create a station’s unique ID and time-stamp. The input can be any real-world source: your off-air signal (or a competitor’s), a test file from a production studio, an Internet stream, or even a live mic listening to a sample radio in a public space. If there are watermarks hidden in the audio, TVC-15 will report their details.

As an option for stations with a Voltair watermark monitor and processor, TVC-15 can also be utilized to automatically adjust enhancement levels in real-time. TVC-15’s Intelligent Adaptive Enhancement (AE) closes the feedback loop, letting broadcasters dynamically control Voltair processing based on moment-by-moment analysis of their actual air signal, pushing enhancement when it is needed, while backing off when not. TVC-15 allows Voltair users to better optimize the trade-off between robust watermarking and clean audio.