Bridge Tech Intros Digital Services Monitoring

Bridge Technologies' major item at NAB 2015 is a new technology designed to make monitoring for digital video services quicker to set up and fault-tracking more accurate and secure. The company's Gold TS Reference includes the checks specified in the ETR290 standard, but also includes testing for conditions missed by ETR290, such as errors in the conditional access system, failures of the program guide and unintended language changes.

It allows users to take a "snapshot" of a correctly functioning stream to create a template including all the stream's correct values and settings, against which performance is subsequently compared in real time. Any deviation from any of the values in the reference is automatically detected and presented in a color-coded display. Conditions such as time differences in the program guide or a change of language would not be detected and flagged as faults by conventional ETR290 checks, even though they have significant impact on the subscriber.