Continual provision of the level of reliability that consumers have come to expect from traditional TV services over IP networks is an on-going challenge for content providers and CDNs alike.

Having real-time visibility of large volumes of dynamically changing assets over increasingly evolving delivery methods with stringent DRM restrictions requires a high level of automation, intelligence and flexibility to deliver.

Nxtera’s nVision solution supports a number of optional scenarios including IPTV, VoD, Mobile, adaptive streaming and the ability to integrate with multiple delivery platforms to provide a comprehensive end-to-end monitoring solution for IP media.

By automating data collection, asset tracking and quality testing, results can be correlated and displayed on a service dashboard, displaying service status at a glance.

 nVision Suite Components – nSpector, nPlayer & nTelligence

nSpector – What, When & How?

In order to understand your service quality, for each asset or channel, a media company must understand what is the asset, when should it be available and how will it be delivered.

Fundamental to all of these questions is asset management and the delivery work flow. Using nVision toolsets, each asset can be checked during each stage of its delivery, from transcoding all the way through to a user requesting and consuming the content at the edge of the network.

By integrating with current tools, platforms and workflows, the nVision suite delivers a complete end-to-end capability whilst maximising existing management platform investment. Automation is key to this, and our flexible tools can scale to minimise the amount of manual tasks required to support an ever growing playlist.

nPlayer – Quantifying quality

Many challenges face media providers, including geographic distribution, DRM, closed captions, multiple delivery partners and services, and to check each asset is delivered on time and how it should would be labour intensive to watch each program – this is what nPlayer gives you.

Deploying nPlayer provides you quality of experience statistics as if customers  have been deployed across your entire delivery chain, checking each piece of content is available when it should be (and not when it shouldn’t), its quality is acceptable and any attached meta information is correct. Unlike a user however, the quality of the content is scored so that you can quantify its performance.

By using real life media players and emulating real consumers on representative hardware platforms an accurate measurement of performance can be formed

nTelligence – Analytics, Workflow and Presentation

By collating the rich information from asset libraries, subsystems and tests, scheduling test playlists and presenting the results in a meaningful way requires intelligence. Nxtera nTelligence is an automated workflow tool that orders tests and outputs the current performance of your service catalogue.

nTelligence allows you to prioritise and schedule tests based on a number of criteria and rules that can be defined and customised depending on your environment.

The dashboard views then allow you to drill down onto your service by asset, by playout time, by rendition type, by geographical area or by performance exception.

Modular by design

nVision is a modular suite, that allows extensive, carrier class scalability. Each remote component communicates with nTelligence via a secure connection and can work autonomously for periods should the communication be lost.

The dashboard itself is accessed via SSL and your browser. iPhone, iPad and Android compatible dashboards can be produced so that you can check your service status on mobile devices, on wall boards or workstations.

Delivery options

The nVision platform can either be delivered as a dedicated, on- site turnkey solution or via Nxtera’s hosted managed service run from our secure, UK list-x premises. Either way, our professional services team will help you rapidly get the most out of the platform.