IBC 2019: Telestream to introduce OptiQ Monitor 

At IBC 2019, Telestream will introduce its second OptiQ live service. OptiQ Monitor creates  efficiencies in capital and operational expenditure while assuring optimum levels of quality of service and quality of experience for broadcasters, service providers and network operators worldwide.

To successfully deliver a fully monetized, rights protected, high quality event or channel requires more than just a world class encoder or packager. It starts with a good knowledge of what the broadcaster is delivering through pervasive video monitoring and analytics. OptiQ Monitor targets customers that have already put in place the infrastructure required to support their live streaming channels but have no monitoring infrastructure, especially post-CDN.

OptiQ as a framework of live services is a merging of the entire Telestream skill set around live streaming, workflow, cloud, integrated monitoring, containers and much more. The first application – OptiQ Channel – was showcased at NAB with its ultra-fast deployment, fully integrated monitoring and self-healing capabilities. Since Telestream started its development, it has become clear that underlying this channel creation system is an OptiQ framework that enables the creation of multiple different live services to meet different customer needs.

OptiQ Monitor enables users to integrate a superior level of video monitoring without needing to modify anything in their existing delivery chain. Building on this through OptiQ Channel, Telestream can provide all the necessary packaging, encoding, ingest environments to help customers build high quality live channels quickly and easily.

A key feature of the OptiQ framework is the ability to deploy Telestream technology in any public cloud datacentre. Now, Telestream has the ability with OptiQ Monitor to select any cloud datacentre, or as many as is required, and to specify the types of monitoring probes that customers want to push into those datacentres. Then, the system architect hits ‘go’ and the entire monitoring network is automatically built up to perform robust QoS and QoE monitoring of a customer’s live streaming channels, even if they are not using OptiQ Channel to create those channels.

OptiQ Monitor allows users to observe how their CDNs are performing across multiple geographies. Also, they can monitor the performance of video encoders across their entire distribution network. If this performance is sub-optimal Telestream possesses a fast and cost efficient solution. OptiQ Channel will deliver robust and efficient live streaming channels as a service in a completely cloud-deployed way.

“OptiQ Monitor enables successfully delivered channels in highly efficient and cost effective ways,” commented Kenneth Haren, OptiQ product manager at Telestream. “Without effective monitoring you don’t have a channel. If you don’t monitor extensively and have granular visibility of the channel across all the geographies that it serves, and the devices and platforms that you seek to leverage then you can’t be confident that you are delivering a high quality channel. Having good visibility of the health of a channel centres on the ability to monitor and analyse video data.”

OptiQ Monitor will be commercially available before IBC. Its speed to market is due to Telestream already possessing the enabling technology, understanding how to deploy it and having the multi cloud support needed to ensure worldwide support. At IBC, Telestream will showcase both OptiQ Monitor and OptiQ Channel. See Telestream on booth 7.C16 and 7.C14.

Intelligent media processing, secure delivery, and intuitive video analytics
Telestream will also showcase end-to-end live streaming solutions, strategic advances in video encoding and transcoding systems, and the latest developments in video monitoring and analytics, both on premise and in virtualized environments. It will provide the first showcase of the new extended company since Tektronix’s video test, monitoring and quality assurance solutions for the broadcast and digital media markets were integrated into Telestream.

The company’s CEO, Scott Puopolo, believes that IBC 2019 comes at a strategic watershed in the broadcast industry’s evolution away from linear broadcasts and towards OTT distribution. With industry analysts predicting organic growth in the OTT monitoring and compliance market of 15.8 per cent each year up to $149.7 million by 2024 (source Frost & Sullivan), Telestream is focussed on this key growth sector.

“We believe that the combination of file-based media processing and workflow orchestration along with live video streaming for both production and distribution applications, all supported with advanced video monitoring and analytics is a highly valuable combination: this is our strategy and it is what visitors will see on our booth at IBC,” states Puopolo. “At IBC, you will see Telestream continue to bolster its position in the core markets where we operate today. We are focused on being the de facto standard in the areas that we currently compete and all the work that we do both in terms of innovation and acquisition is driven by that.”

With both live and file-based applications in mind, a key focus for Telestream in 2019 and beyond is cloud transformation and virtualization. Vantage Cloud Port, which leverages Telestream Cloud services, allows seamless cloud execution of Vantage processing actions in combination with on-prem deployments making for an easy transition to the cloud. Another Telestream cloud-based innovation sees the first showcase of comprehensive, integrated video monitoring for distribution applications implemented on a consumption-based business model.

For media processing and workflow orchestration, Telestream will exhibit the latest advances in centralized, automated workflows with the Vantage Media Processing Platform whereby editors spend more time on creative work and managers have more predictable schedules, storage savings and network traffic reductions. New this year will be innovations in IMF workflows, file management for Vantage, UHD and HDR and live edit capability for resource-efficient remote production.

A central part of Telestream’s showcase for distribution applications highlights the strategic role that Telestream iQ’s video quality assurance solution plays in ensuring a high quality of viewing experience. Key QoE and QoS enhancements will be demonstrated at IBC for the company’s ABR solution, and a key addition to the iQ linear monitoring product portfolio is support for Remote PHY networks.