No one is more delighted about the video revolution in telecom than the folks at Tektronix. The company's video expertise has garnered it numerous awards. Tektronix' reputation was further enhanced by its acquisition of Inet Technologies in late 2004.

“Our monitoring capabilities for video were strong and just got stronger with the Inet acquisition,” said Gary McFarlane, Tektronix' director of communications business marketing.

To cash in on its long history of video testing and monitoring, Tektronix introduced new diagnostic and analysis capabilities for IPTV. The company's Spectra2/VQM, or video quality measurement, tool provides real-time video control plane and video media quality testing solutions for network operators and network equipment manufacturers.

With a brand name only test companies can get away with, the Spectra2/VQM version 2.0 is built as a platform for quality of service (QOS) and quality of experience (QOE) metrics. It is an integrated, multi-user video media quality, signaling and control protocol analyzer.

“Both QOS and QOE will be the key to success in this market,” McFarlane said. “It's all about best-in-class video.”

The new video product is built on what Chris Kirk, product manager for test and assurance at Tektronix, calls the hard lesson learned from the voice-over-IP space, where they have a Spectra2 VoIP tool. The tool leverages the company's converged voice network testing platform to deliver IP video and network quality metrics, such as presence, accuracy and delivery to ensure network performance and service reliability.

The new video tool supports IPTV signaling and media analysis in an easy-to-use graphical user interface running on a multi-user platform. Its signaling analysis capabilities include support of the two major video control protocols: Internet group management protocol (IGMP) and real-time streaming protocol (RTSP). Support for the IGMP (multicast) and RTSP (unicast) protocols ensures the company's ability to serve the largest possible content market, the largest number of service providers and service offerings, and the largest number of network equipment manufacturers.

Features of the new tool include a discovery function that automatically detects which video channels are active while allowing users to manually add video stream channels as necessary. The discovery function provides a top-level view of all media channels currently detected and analyzed, including the active state of the channels, real-time bit rates, mode and status. Other features include the display of QOS statistics for real-time monitoring and rapid fault isolation of live video streams.

Spectra2/VQM determines QOS and QOE for IP video signaling and video transport. It also supports simultaneous testing and monitoring of high-volume single program transport streams. The session trace feature for video-on-demand lets users see associated RTSP and media messages for each video-on-demand session being analyzed.

Not the stuff of box office blockbusters, we know, but it makes the blockbuster possible, whether it's on the big screen or just a big screen TV fed by the phone company.