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Mixed Signals Launches Industry's First Monitoring Solution for Switched Digital Video and VOD Deployments

Posted on: Monday, 2 June 2008, 09:21 CDT

Mixed Signals, the leading provider of digital content monitoring solutions, today announced Sentry Edge, the cable television industry's first comprehensive monitoring solution designed specifically for scalable and cost-effective monitoring of complex switched digital video (SDV) and video-on-demand (VOD) deployments. Sentry Edge enables operators to ensure they provide subscribers with a high-quality and continuous viewing experience as they rollout SDV and expand their VOD deployments.

"With its promise of freeing up substantial bandwidth, SDV is a strategic initiative for operators, but it poses several challenges to ensuring delivery of quality television service to subscribers," explained Eric Conley, CEO of Mixed Signals. "After discussing these concerns with leading operators over the past year, we developed Sentry Edge to comprehensively monitor the critical aspects of an SDV deployment to enable operators to quickly identify and rectify problems, so they can free up bandwidth and preserve the best possible experience for subscribers."

Operators nationwide are in various stages of deploying or testing SDV, which involves the installation and integration of substantial amounts of new equipment, including edge QAMs (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), switch/routers, servers and session resource managers -- in many cases from multiple vendors. Though operators perform extensive integration testing, real-world experience shows that the complex interaction between these devices and the content flowing through them often creates service affecting issues. Operators have seen several operational issues to date such as over-subscribed QAMs, 'channel not available' messages and switching errors that cause the wrong channel to be delivered to the subscriber.

Sentry Edge has been designed specifically for the increasingly complex SDV environment. Even in a multi-vendor, heterogeneous environment, Sentry Edge not only reports on switching activities and valuable statistics such as bandwidth utilization; more importantly, it alerts operators to critical SDV issues such as switching errors, bandwidth oversubscription and cross-content issues prior to distribution.

In addition to its unprecedented monitoring and reporting capabilities, each Sentry Edge is uniquely designed as a scalable and cost-effective solution for operators even as they add service groups. Without this extremely scalable solution, effective monitoring of the SDV architecture quickly becomes difficult to manage and tremendously costly using competitive products.

Sentry Edge has unique design elements for SDV and VOD deployments, and operators can combine it with Mixed Signals' Sentry(R) digital content monitor and Medius remote monitoring and management system for a broader view of their entire network, from "the source to the edge."

With its unparalleled ability to monitor actual audio and video content, Sentry continues to be the company's flagship product, providing operators the most comprehensive solution for closely monitoring all programming and services in a network. In an SDV architecture, operators deploy Sentry in its headend to identify anomalies in the network at the IP, MPEG and content layers, identifying hundreds of categories of issues, including video freeze, video black and the loss of single and multi-channel audio, which represent the bulk of trouble calls from subscribers.

The combination of Sentry Edge, Sentry and Medius provides operators with the industry's most integrated, comprehensive and network-wide solution for ensuring an optimal QoE for their subscribers.

Mixed Signals will demonstrate Sentry Edge in its booth (# 623) at the upcoming Cable-Tec Expo, June 24-27, in Philadelphia.

About Mixed Signals

Mixed Signals provides the most comprehensive and scalable digital content monitoring solutions from the source to the edge including digital services, transport streams, ad insertion, switched digital video, video on demand and interactive content. Mixed Signals' innovative products offer unparalleled visibility into video streams and digital services in real time. The Company's products are known for their ease of use and deliver critical intelligence about overall network transport stream behavior, trending analyses, and actionable alerts when anomalies are detected. More than any other product on the market today, Mixed Signals monitoring solutions enable cable and satellite television operators, broadcasters, content aggregators and IPTV providers to simplify deployments of new services and applications, and to future-proof and maximize the return on the investment in their digital networks.

For more information visit www.mixedsignals.com or call 310-227-8620.

Source: Business Wire

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