Rolling out IPTV is an expensive and extremely complex proposition.
There are a number of technical challenges involved with broadcast and
on-demand video services, including building a new service delivery
network that can handle the increased bandwidth needs of IPTV. Those
challenges include re-engineering the core network to support video
services, and adding new technologies for video content management,
distribution, and billing.

With the amount of infrastructure upgrades required, these IPTV
initiatives are costing major providers billions of dollars (e.g.,
AT&T has publicly discussed plans to spend $4.6 billion to deploy
IPTV service to 19 million homes in 40 new markets by the end of 2008.).

On top of the technical challenges and investments, customer’s
quality expectations are elevated because of their experiences with
existing television services from cable and satellite providers. Not
only do the new IPTV offerings need to be compelling enough to lure
customers away from their existing television providers, but providers
must also roll out IPTV services that meet user expectations or risk
losing the customer for their IPTV and other bundled services business.

With so much being invested in IPTV infrastructure and content, and
the extremely high customer acquisition costs associated with luring
customers away from existing providers, telecommunications service
providers need to deploy a quality IPTV offering in order to compete.
IPTV promises to be a very lucrative service for telcos, but it must be
reliable, customizable, flexible, live up to its hype, and ultimately
drive new customer acquisitions and additional revenue opportunities.

Monitoring Live IPTV Service Ensures Success
The highly performance-sensitive nature of IPTV means that service
providers must assure the end-to-end quality of this service as well as
the video programming content (broadcast and video on demand), starting
at the head end and continuing throughout the service delivery network,
all the way down to their subscribers’ set-top boxes (STBs). A
comprehensive IPTV service assurance solution requires segmenting the
IPTV delivery network and distributing service assurance appliance
throughout the network, enabling providers to monitor and analyze the
impact of the transport network and video stream manipulation processes
as content traverses the network, in real time.

A distributed service assurance architecture allows constant
monitoring of live IPTV programming providing in-network visibility
into end-to-end video quality. This is extremely important as providers
strive to offer high-quality IPTV services, providing the service
intelligence to ensure video quality, meet service level agreements
(SLAs), and meet subscribers’ quality of experience (QoE) expectations.
As an attractive component of service providers’ bundled service
offerings, providers must continually assure the performance and
quality of their IPTV services to build a loyal customers base,
increase subscriber up-take rates, and significantly reduce churn.

Continually Assuring Quality
The best solution is to deliver complete visibility into service
quality and performance. This allows providers to easily establish
performance metrics, warning thresholds, desired test configurations,
and test schedules to ensure they are meeting quality standards on an
ongoing basis.

When problems are identified, an effective service assurance
solution provides actionable information to quickly determine the
root-cause and isolate problems, saving costly diagnostic and repair
times. Knowing exactly where a problem is occurring (IP/MPLS core,
distribution network, or at the home) can significantly reduce the
impact on support staff, decrease the need for expensive truck rolls,
and solve problems in a timely manner to minimize effects on the
customer. Service assurance systems that provide this information
typically deliver a return on investment (ROI) in less than three
months.

Service assurance throughout the IPTV lifecycle enables providers to
successfully introduce and manage IPTV services faster and more
cost-effectively, while continually assuring the highest service
quality.

Three Key Components of IPTV Service Assurance
When investigating IPTV service assurance solutions, it is critical
that the solution provides complete, end-to-end service visibility
across the infrastructure. The complexity of the infrastructure and the
dynamic nature of video content create many potential points of failure
that can have a detrimental impact on the customer experience.
Traditional operational support systems (OSS) and network management
systems (NMS) can’t provide the required end-to-end visibility and
don’t monitor live traffic and services effectively.

The ideal IPTV service assurance solution should offer visibility
into the quality of the underlying transmission infrastructure, video
content quality, and the overall customer experience – the most
important components of the IPTV network. By constantly monitoring
network and service performance, telecommunications providers can
identify IP transmission issues versus video quality impairments, check
video quality with end-to-end service visibility, and proactively
manage the overall experience of its valued subscribers.

In order to effectively measure and monitor the end-to-end
performance of an IPTV service, there are three critical areas that
need to be addressed: infrastructure quality, content quality, and
customer experience quality.

Area 1. Infrastructure Quality
A key element of assuring IPTV service quality is providing visibility
into how the network behaves when IP video streams are carried over it.
An effective live monitoring solution allows service providers to
instantly identify whether infrastructure impairments exist in their
national, regional, or local content aggregation and distribution
locations, and allow them to resolve these issues before service
quality is compromised. Additionally, service assurance lets providers: