"You can think of us as 10,000 TV viewers crammed into a little black box," says Shenick Network Systems' co-founder Robert Winters. "Those 10,000 viewers have always been there, and we've now enhanced diversifEye so that it can also function as a single viewer's pair of eyes."

Shenick's diversifEye is a testing tool that ensures that the many systems that drive the Internet do what they're supposed to do. Constant quality testing of this infrastructure has always been important, and it is even more crucial now, with the emergence of so-called triple play services: the increasing convergence of voice, video and high-speed Internet -- and the growing risk of security attacks, which comes with it.

Essentially, diversifEye emulates regular Internet user and Internet TV (IPTV) viewer traffic and also launches Internet-based attacks, to test a system's response to them. By emulating thousands of users, or a single one of them, it can show a system's manager precisely how well it is working. In industry shorthand, diverfEye's basic function is to test performance limitations and measure QoS and QoE -- quality of service and quality of experience.

Shenick sells diversifEye to the world's foremost communications equipment manufacturers, network service providers, governments and large enterprises, such as banks and insurance companies. They use diversifEye to both test their current systems and evaluate systems they're thinking of buying.

Precise measurement of the user's QoS and QoE is of paramount importance to triple-play service providers. One of the many key measures of quality here is channel-surf rate. In other words, how long it takes to change a TV channel?

Says Jessy Cavazos, a program manager at Frost & Sullivan, a prominent industry analysis and consulting firm, "IPTV services and VoIP are highly sensitive to quality of service issues. TV viewers in particular have zero tolerance of video quality and performance problems, such as unacceptable delays in channel change times."

Adds Shenick's Robert Winters, "Delays of only a few seconds could easily drive IPTV customers back to traditional TV service providers."

To help prevent that, diversifEye offers full IGMP multicast emulation for testing applications such as IPTV and VoD (video on demand), along with high-speed Internet services, including HTTP, e-mail and streaming, and such delay-sensitive applications as VoIP, all running concurrently. Moreover, the operations can be viewed in both real time and simulations and projections based on current activity, either from the point of view of thousands of users or only one.