Thomson Bolsters Quality of Experience for IPTV

Thomson has extended its range of SmartVision content delivery components with the introduction of a new network server. Using advanced technologies including packet loss recovery and fast channel change, it significantly improves the quality of experience for subscribers over IPTV networks.

Quality of Experience (QoE) quantifies the user experience based on both objective and subjective quality perceptions. The two most important defects that impact the QoE are the video artifacts caused by network impairments such as packet loss and the long channel change times.

SmartVision QoE servers improve the overall user experience in these two aspects, Thomson said. It is capable of bringing fast channel change times while implementing a packet loss recovery mechanism that guarantees that the picture quality does not suffer from macro blocks or freeze/black frames caused by network packet loss.

"With a capture capability of up to 400 TV channels and more than 10,000 users simultaneously connected to the server, SmartVision is a scalable and cost-effective solution for improving the user experience over any IPTV system," said Tiaan Schutte, general manager of Thomson software and service platforms business unit, in a statement.

Using standards-based communication protocols, the STB notifies the SmartVision QoE server when changing channels so that it can receive the first video frame much more quickly than what it would otherwise take. This brings the channel change delay down from a typical two seconds to less than a second when combined with STB optimizations, the company said.

When packet loss is detected by the STB, it requests a retransmission of the missing packets according to the RTP retry standards (RFC4585, RFC4588). Because of the way that the SmartVision QoE server handles this request, the missing packet is recovered before the decoding process so that there is no audio/video impairment in the signal to the viewer.

Based on the latest DVB and Internet standards, the SmartVision QoE server is interoperable with any set-top box that implements these recommendations, and does not require the implementation of proprietary agents running on the STB.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines