SeaChange Certifies Shenick’s Unique Technology to Test QoE of Video-On-Demand Streams

SeaChange and Shenick Help Customers Meet Subscriber Expectations for High Quality VOD

Burlingame, Calif. - Shenick Network Systems, provider of per-flow IP communications test and monitoring systems, announced that its diversifEye per-flow architecture has been certified by SeaChange International as the only test product to provide a uniquely flexible platform to emulate and measure each individual video-on-demand (VoD) client behind residential gateways. With Shenick’s diversifEye™, SeaChange’s telco and cable operator customers can quantify the quality of every video watched to help them meet subscribers’ high expectations for quality of experience (QoE).

Shenick’s diversifEye enables complete functional and scalability testing of the VoD delivery architecture for customers of SeaChange’s Axiom On Demand open content delivery platform. The technology simulates set-top boxes with VoD real-time streaming (RTSP) clients that are compliant with SeaChange video servers. Using diversifEye enables SeaChange customers to have the flexibility to perform stateful, functional and scalability testing of both the control plane and media plane architecture of the VoD solution and also to quantify the effect of mixed traffic environments on the quality of video flows right up to thousands of users at 10Gigabit Ethernet levels.

“We moved from VoD being used by early adopters to becoming a mainstream application used in tens of millions of homes and the challenge faced by service providers is that consumers have set an extremely high threshold level for the expected quality of video flows. Even one customer disrupted is one customer too many,” said Robert Winters, chief marketing officer, Shenick Network Systems. “It is not sufficient for a service provider to measure aggregate service quality in their predeployment tests, it’s become necessary to be able to quantify the quality of the video offering for each subscriber. Shenick’s diversifEye can help triple play providers to view individual subscriber service quality on a highly granular basis.”

“SeaChange is focused on continuously improving operators’ performance and bottom line and Shenick’s capabilities add further assurances of service quality, especially as subscriber use of VOD continues to grow,” said Alan Hoff, senior director of on-demand solutions, SeaChange International. “Shenick’s per flow architecture gives us a new means to see how networks perform up to 10 Gigabit speeds and also provides a microscopic view on the impact that network flows have on subscriber quality of experience.”

Shenick’s diversifEye is being used internationally by companies who specialize in VoD delivery. It enables both active and passive analysis. Passive analysis applies real-time analysis to any video stream. Active analysis goes one step further to compare the source media stream and subscriber received stream for discrepancies. In addition, Shenick’s per-flow architecture enables very granular control of the signaling processes and equally granular per-flow measurement capability meaning that each individual entity can be concurrently configured, controlled and measured.