IneoQuest Technologies, a provider of concepts and metrics for ensuring quality of service and quality of experience, announced it has designed so-called first-of-a-kind solutions that can monitor, analyze and report about the quality of the content that is being streamed to the Apple iPhone (News - Alert).
The new IneoQuest’s (News - Alert) Cricket HLS probes and the IQSegVue iPhone application are designed to run on Apple’s unique HTTP Live streaming protocol and offer end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting facilities to help providers and mobile network operators maintain and ensure quality of the content they are delivering to their subscribers and effectively manage their network.
According to IneoQuest officials, the Cricket HLS is a "powerful" and cost-effective probe for real-time video transmission over Apple (News - Alert) HTTP Live Streaming protocol and this tool enables centralized monitoring of video quality and service and field troubleshooting for operators who need to monitor, analyze and debug signals before and after distribution over mobile networks and other bandwidth-constrained media.
The Cricket HLS probes can be deployed before the distribution network to check the encoder that offers deep packet segment inspection and analyses HTTP commands to assure protocol compliance before transmission. By placing the probes at the end of the distribution network providers can monitor video transport stream issues capturing metrics such as HTTP-based file loss, bitrates and outages, as well as audio quality issues.
Multiple Cricket HLS probes located across the network can be integrated to IneoQuest’ iVMS for efficient correlation of real-time measurements captured at the Cricket locations. The data about the video and transport stream before and after HTTP segmentation are delivered to the iVMS management system for integrated analysis and reporting, enabling providers to pinpoint the exact location of a failure and promptly troubleshoot before the subscriber is impacted.
For final monitoring and troubleshooting, content providers can leverage IQSegVue app to monitor the quality of streaming video at the delivery point. IQSegVue serves as a video player on an iPhone or iPod Touch and allows an engineer to request and join a live video broadcast to view the QoE in real time and the app can also be used to view real-time statistics and measurement data about video quality metrics.
Calvin Harrison, vice president of marketing and business development at IneoQuest said that the number of iPhone users is skyrocketing and subscribers are increasingly demanding additional content delivery to these mobile devices. For content providers, this offers an entire new revenue stream and an additional opportunity to reach viewers. Working with forward-thinking content providers, their research and development team has expanded their family of products to help harness the power of Apple's ground-breaking HTTP Live streaming protocol and benefit from this new approach. The Cricket HLS probes and IQSegVue measurement of live video traffic helps improve the business aspects of video services and mobile content.
Recently IneoQuest launched iPhone app for service providers.
Nathesh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Nathesh's articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Erin Harrison