Sentry Simplifies Quality Monitoring with Expanded Support for OTT/Video Cloud Workflows, Ad Insertion Monitoring, CMAF Support and More

Tektronix Inc., an industry-leading innovator of video test, monitoring and diagnostics solutions, announced that its Sentry real-time video quality content monitoring solution now delivers live and on-demand video quality assurance across cloud and virtual streaming workflows. With its latest enhancements, Sentry simplifies quality monitoring across today’s complex environments giving real visibility into streaming content quality along with in-depth analysis and compliance reporting for OTT/multiscreen services with global scalability.

The overarching issue faced by video content providers moving to cloud streaming environments is visibility into content quality and where problems are occurring. Maintaining quality is critical to delivering the experience customers expect and minimizing churn, a major factor in a streamed environment with low barriers to switching providers. By providing a single view that spans cloud, virtual and on-premise workflows, Sentry simplifies quality assurance compared to alternatives involving multiple monitoring platforms.

“In a fast moving and rapidly changing world, service providers need confidence that their content is present and is being delivered correctly, regardless of the underlying technology or scale. Sentry, which is already widely adopted across the North American cable industry and major European telecom operators, delivers that confidence while saving time and reducing cost,” said Charlie Dunn, general manager, video product line, Tektronix.

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New Sentry capabilities for OTT streaming service monitoring that will be demonstrated at the upcoming NAB Show April 7-12 in Las Vegas include the following:

• Ad Insertion Monitoring for ABR – Sentry now provides advertising insertion analysis with programmatic control for OTT streaming content. Sentry monitors that ads are correctly placed within the ABR stream and playing back with the same quality as other content.
• Common Media Application Format (CMAF) support – An emerging standard that allows streaming providers to encode their media in one common format vs multiple formats, CMAF greatly reduces the number of streaming variations needed to deliver services. The Sentry CMAF-compatible monitoring solution will be demonstrated at NAB.
• Sentry monitoring for AWS MediaLive and MediaPackage – Sentry is gaining recognition as an industry leading quality assurance monitoring solution for the full set of live AWS Media services. Sentry’s performance and capabilities on the AWS cloud have been fully tested and confirmed in partnership with AWS Elemental. At NAB, Tektronix will be showing quality assurance monitoring of streaming through the AWS MediaLive encoder and MediaPackage ABR packager across the AWS CloudFront CDN.
• 4K and HbbTV DASH streaming enhancements – Sentry ABR now supports 4K HEVC DASH cloud streaming including HbbTV MPEG-DASH enhancements.
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) live streaming – Tektronix will demonstrate live stream quality monitoring with Sentry on GCP, giving customers flexible and simplified cloud stream monitoring solutions independent of their cloud provider.

Other enhancements to Sentry include Video on Demand (VoD) ABR testing, HTTPS secure stream support, and cloud-based subscription support.

Sentry is a scalable Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring solution for streaming content. It can look at the actual content being provided to verify there are no major quality issues (blocking, audio drop out, frozen frames) and that the content meets regulatory compliance requirements (SCTE35 Type testing, Closed Caption and Loudness testing). With Digital Rights Management (DRM) support, Sentry ABR can decrypt each program by applying DRM and can view and report on the content seen by subscribers.

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