APS Chooses Volicon’s quality monitoring for South African Viewers

Astra Platform Services (APS), one of Germany's foremost broadcasting and playout centers, has implemented Volicon's Observer Remote Program Monitor (RPM) 400 to provide remote quality monitoring for delivery of a range of TV services to the South African market, it was announced on June 2, 2010.

Astra Platform Services GmbH (APS) is a subsidiary of SES ASTRA and operates one of Europe's most modern broadcasting centres.

As Volicon's post-set-top-box (STB) video service assurance solution for cable, IPTV, mobile, and satellite video service providers, the Observer RPM 400 is enabling APS to proactively monitor and troubleshoot transmissions to ensure the highest quality of experience (QoE) for South African viewers.

"Since we would be delivering services outside the ASTRA European footprint, it was essential that we have a centralized means of quality monitoring for these remote international program offerings," said Stefan Vollmer, APS. "Since it is a post-STB solution, the Observer RPM 400 gives us an efficient and cost-effective way to verify exactly what viewers are seeing. Also, the system's easy-to-use and yet rich feature set for remote monitoring via Web browser was a big selling point for us."

APS broadcasts more than 200 channels from its main broadcasting facility in Munich. Installed at a remote location, the Observer RPM 400 system continuously scans all channels in the line-up and tests signal integrity. It issues alerts (via e-mail and SNMP) to NOC engineers when transmission quality falls below APS's preset thresholds. The system automatically detects such faults as missing/frozen/black video, low audio levels, and macro-blocking. APS enlisted German systems integrator ANEDIS for installation support.

More information about the Volicon Observer product family is available at www.volicon.com.