It's hard to believe there are more than 200 companies looking for IPTV test solutions, but that's how many customers Ixia says it has for its IPTV test suite. Some are network equipment manufacturers, others are service providers and some are groups within those providers and NEMs. Either way, the purchase of test gear is a good indicator of the pace at which the market is beginning to move.

Similarly, partnerships and OEM relationships are good indicators of the technology being sought to help that market move. IP performance test systems company Ixia recently began an OEM relationship with Opticom to add its full reference video quality metric to Ixia's video testing solution.

Ted Burns, senior director of professional services for Ixia, said it has the right combination of technology to drive that pace. “When your biggest customer is asking for something, that's a good sign,” he said.

And customers, he said, are asking for ways to better measure IPTV quality. Ixia's latest release of its testing suite features PEVQ, a full reference video quality metric. It stands for perceptual evaluation of video quality, and it gives a mean opinion score (MOS). The PEVQ MOS estimates degradation by analyzing the video signal output from the network. It detects anomalies in the video signal quantified by a variety of key performance indicators.

Opticom's PEVQ V 1.1 evaluates the quality of CIF, QCIF, Rec. 601 and VGA video formats based on perceptual measurement. The standard is based on the earlier perceptual voice quality metrics developed by KPN Research. Opticom uses it to compare the transmitted video file to the original source video file.

Ixia's suite can also test IPTV service using network-based metrics that reflect the transport network's impact on video.

Ixia provides indicators for video transport performance based on network-level IP measurements and TVQM — a zero reference video quality metric. These perceptual metrics include the increasingly apparent and annoying “zap time” intervals. That refers to how long it takes the system to respond to one's commands from the remote control.

Burns said the combination of Ixia's test suite and Opticom's PEVQ allows for a pixel-by-pixel analysis of the video stream, which was once out of the question due to the amount of data needed to be analyzed in real time.

“There is more power to emulate more channels. We can even stream high definition,” Burns said.

Ixia's IPTV test solution is based on the IxLoad application, which tests triple-play network performance and services such as web browsing, file transfer, e-mail, streaming media and voice-over-IP services.

This testing combo will be more important for video than voice, so it arrives just in time. Voice service users have lowered their tolerance level for voice quality, but their demands for quality video are growing everyday. They have been spoiled by high definition in a way that makes the Sprint pin drop commercials seem quaint by comparison.