Tektronix Delivers Network Monitoring Expertise to Address Challenges for the Next Phase of Broadcasting

Latest Enhancements to Sentry Help Broadcasters Deliver High Quality Content and Achieve Compliance

Tektronix, Inc., an industry-leading innovator of video quality monitoring solutions, today announced a series of enhancements to its Sentry video quality monitors tailored to the needs of broadcasters. Broadcasters have been challenged with the ever increasing competition from OTT providers, the FCC repack and having to meet even tighter compliance regulations. The enhancements to Sentry help Broadcasters remain competitive while reducing operational costs. These include full TR 101 290 monitoring and alarming, new RF interfaces and end-to-end closed caption checks to ensure the output meets the latest FCC regulations. The new Sentry capabilities will be demonstrated in Booth #SU5006 at NAB Show, taking place April 18-21 in Las Vegas.

Many broadcasters and other service providers rely heavily on standards like TR 101 290 to monitor Quality of Service (QoS) and Sentry provides real-time monitoring and alerting to notify broadcasters right away if there are errors related to the priority checks they are most concerned about. This saves them on operational costs related to resolving issues. In addition to TR 101 290 Priority 1, 2 and 3 checks, Sentry also supports a range of program clock reference (PCR) measurements including PCR jitter, PCR drift, PCR frequency offset and PCR cycle time.

Further adding to its broadcast monitoring capabilities, Sentry’s RF monitoring capabilities have been expanded to include two new RF interfaces, DVB-S/S2 and DVB-T/T2. These new interfaces, along with IP, ASI and 8VSB allow easy integration into any broadcast signal distribution monitoring scheme.

Service providers including broadcasters and cable operators must comply with FCC Title 47 rules or face the risk of fines or other actions. For enhanced closed caption monitoring, Nexidia Comply is now integrated with Sentry. Nexidia Comply provides an accurate, scalable and affordable automation solution that empowers broadcasters to verify that captions and video description across all of their outputs comply with Title 47 FCC regulations.

“Broadcasters turn to Sentry as an affordable QoS monitoring solution for identifying and isolating problems quickly,” saidCharlie Dunn, general manager, Video Product Line, Tektronix. “Then, over time as they add more services and capabilities, they can very easily and affordably upgrade to full quality of experience (QoE) monitoring.”

Sentry is a next generation video and audio quality monitoring solution for advanced video networks, offering scalable and comprehensive QoE and QoS monitoring. It enables video service providers to deliver services with optimum quality while reducing operational expenditures.

Availability

The new enhancements to Sentry are available now.

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