Octoshape announces a strategic partnership with leading software development company Craftwork, which specializes in solutions for the Digital TV industry.

Over-the-top consumer offerings are rapidly evolving in the industry, bringing with them a host of challenges. Video quality, network capacity, profitable business models, and time to market concerns are each issues the industry faces everyday. Producing TV quality living room experiences on high-resolution devices is a clear milestone to reach in the industry.

Network Instruments announces that its Observer performance management platform now provides in-depth tracking and analysis of IPTV video applications. Further, features have been added to facilitate the sharing of Observer data and analysis between IT teams, provide in-depth NFS transaction monitoring, and enhance GigaStor's security investigation capabilities.

IPTV The Observer platform now fully supports the monitoring of multicast and unicast IPTV video streams in the context of overall network traffic. Teams can track critical performance metrics including Media Delivery Index, jitter, latency, and packet loss; alarm on specific IPTV errors, and they can also reconstruct and replay IPTV video transmissions.

TELUS has selected Mariner xVu IPTV service monitoring solution to assist with customer assurance of its IPTV-based Optik TV.

SupportVu, an application within Mariner's award winning xVu suite of IPTV Quality of Experience monitoring tools, will deliver real time performance insight to both Optik TV's customer support and field repair stakeholders.

EXFO announces the launch of its EXpert IPTV Test Tools, the latest addition to EXFO's FTB-platform-based EXpert testing software series. Combined with the EXpert IP and EXpert VoIP applications, as well as EXFO's FTB-1 Ethernet and OTDR test modules, EXpert IPTV brings to the industry the most comprehensive and powerful triple-play solution in a portable device designed for growing FTTH deployments worldwide.

Edgeware announces its Distributed Video Delivery Network strategy for network operators. Edgeware's Distributed VDN is a unified framework for video delivery, answering operators' demand for a simple platform to deliver next generation video services with the highest Quality of Experience to any screen, independent of the underlying network infrastructure.

Up until now, meeting the growing consumer demand for high quality content anytime, anywhere, on any device has been a challenge. Operators were forced to take radically different approaches to deliver linear TV, VoD and OTT services. Edgeware's highly scalable solution is infrastructure independent. The Distributed VDN offers operators a simple approach to implement, manage, control and monetize content delivered over their networks.

Mariner announces that Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago is deploying Mariner's xVu IPTV service monitoring solution to support the expansion of services and the maintenance of service quality for its Blink Entertainment TV service.

The xVu service is used in conjunction with Advanced Digital Broadcasting TR-69 software and enables proactive customer support. This is done by providing complete visibility of customers' TV viewing experiences, effectively monitoring in real time the video and audio performance across the entire network, including in the home, and making that critical customer usage and service performance information readily available.

Metrological Media Innovations and IneoQuest Technologies announce that Metrological has licensed IneoQuest's patented and patent-pending quality assurance, IQVeriStream, technology for monitoring adaptive bit rate video streams. The move will allow Metrological to include the IneoQuest quality assurance metrics for adaptive bit rate video delivery in its MediaConnect TV solution.

Adaptive bit rate methodologies are used to stream video to Apple iPhones and iPads, Microsoft Silverlight clients, and many other types of end devices, including next-generation hybrid broadcast-broadband set top box and digital TV designs. The IQVeriStream license granted to Metrological will allow Metrological customers to include the IQVeriStream metrics in their Digital TV and set top box designs and determine whether any problems are local to the client system or due to head-end encoding or network congestion issues. Service providers and head-end operators can then leverage IneoQuest's award-winning solutions for head-end and core networks to determine the root cause of such problems.

SaskTel will commercially deploy xVu, Mariner's revolutionary IPTV Service Assurance platform. xVu will be deployed across SaskTel's 70,000+ Max Entertainment Services (IPTV) customers to provide continuous monitoring and real time feedback of customer's Quality of Experience. The platform will allow SaskTel to proactively manage its IPTV service quality, and to identify and resolve issues often before the customer even realizes there is a problem. xVu monitors QoE of IPTV services during installation, supporting a 'right first time' approach. Post-installation, xVu enables network and customer support personnel to proactively monitor IPTV service delivery and resolve issues, the majority of time before a call has been received from any customers.

Occam Networks takes a leading role in the development of Quality of Experience and Quality of Service recommendations for the deployment of IPTV over DSL. The Broadband Forum’s Technical Report 176, “ADSL2Plus Configuration Guidelines for IPTV” co-editor and contributor Dov Zimring also serves as Occam’s Director of Strategic Technology and Solutions.

Telchemy announces the availability of SQlive, a breakthrough IPTV and IP Videoconferencing performance monitoring application. SQlive is unique in its ability to measure the performance of scrambled/ encrypted IP Video streams, producing Video MOS scores and a wide range of diagnostic metrics; SQlive is compact enough to be easily integrated into IP Set Top Boxes but powerful enough to monitor large numbers of high definition IPTV streams.

Jungo releases its OpenRG residential gateway software now supports a patent-pending, fast channel-switching feature. This solution enables service providers to enhance consumers’ IPTV experience by improving the channel-switching performance of broadband access equipment.

Subscriber Quality of Experience is critical to the success of an IPTV service. While there are many factors affecting IPTV service quality – such as picture quality, transport and reliability – a key QoE element is how quickly and reliably subscribers can change TV channels.

At IBC 2008, BitBand will demonstrate how the company is increasing IPTV adoption among existing and new deployments by catering to scalability and growth demands with a differentiated offering focused on a quality viewing and entertainment experience. Visitors will see how BitBand's scalable intelligent Content Delivery Network and new QualiCTV Quality-of-Experience IPTV solution for fast channel change, provide a cost-effective path for scaling up IPTV services for both on-demand and broadcast content to IPTV service providers all over the world.

Digital Rapids has released a powerful new version of the Digital Rapids Broadcast Manager enterprise-class live encoder management software. Digital Rapids Broadcast Manager provides robust management, monitoring and fault tolerance for multiple live streaming encoders. New features in version 1.3 the second significant update this year includes:

Find out after the jump.

Telcos that are investing heavily in IPTV infrastructure and services to drive new revenues also need to ensure that tools and technologies are in place to monitor their customers' quality of experience with their video services – but telcos aren't sure that today's IPTV QOE test and measurement tools provide the right level of service monitoring, according to a major new report from Heavy Reading.

IPTV Phase II: QOE Is Mission Critical identifies and analyzes the core issues involved in determining QOE for IPTV services. The report explores the issues that affect how to objectively determine QOE in a way that it reflects the subscriber's subjective point of view. It identifies and evaluates key standards and sets out the most likely timetable for the emergence of standards that would give service providers greater confidence in choosing solutions for measuring the quality of their TV services.

Host: Sam Masud, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading

Original Webinar Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Original Webinar Time: 2:00 p.m. New York / 7:00 p.m. London

Overview: Telcos are putting money on the table with high hopes of challenging the traditional TV providers. By delivering TV channels over an IP network, telcos expect to have a more cost-effective business model that will also result in increased revenues. But if they are to be successful, telcos will have to provide IPTV services that, at a minimum, are as good as what subscribers have become accustomed to. This is why IPTV vendors of all sorts are talking about Quality of Experience, or QOE.

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