BEAVERTON, OR – Tektronix announces a series of enhancements to its Aurora automated file-based quality control (QC) solution used by video content creators, post-production houses and content distributors and broadcasters to efficiently test and monitor growing volumes of content. Leading the way is a first-of-its-kind Perceptual Video Quality (PVQ) measurement -- now part of Aurora -- that accurately provides a summarized quality measurement for file-based content. Other enhancements include support for Aurora on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and support for the AS-10 PAD Delivery Specification now required in France.
As the broadcast industry moves toward file based delivery of all services and the increased adoption of multi-screen and Over-The-Top (OTT) media services, the amount of video content that must be tested and verified is expanding rapidly. An efficient way to ensure the quality of all that content is to use an automated QC tool. While these tools offer a speed and cost advantage compared to manual QC, it can be challenging for automated tools to filter out errors that actually impact the viewer's experience compared to the ones that don't, leading to false positives.
With this release of Aurora, Tektronix is directly addressing these challenges by incorporating proven PVQ technology from its Sentry family of video network monitors. This provides an accurate measure of quality that's based on years of real-world evaluation and then gives operators a tight correlation between file-based and live stream monitoring technologies. Just like Sentry, Aurora can now analyze video content using a proprietary algorithm designed to detect video compression artifacts affecting the viewer's quality of experience. Aurora also graphically plots video quality using a format similar to a Mean Opinion Score (MOS). A well-known industry metric, MOS provides a numerical indication of the perceived quality from the viewer's perspective.
Aurora on the Amazon cloud
Cloud-based computing continues to see rapid growth in all industry sectors, and the video industry is no exception. Cloud-based solutions offer a range of advantages including no up-front investment, usage-based pricing models, improved scalability and security. Aurora on the Amazon cloud offers highly scalable automated analysis of file-based video content ingested from different sources, encoded at different bit rates and formats, and using different compression standards for SD/HD, VOD or IPTV delivery.
Like on-premise options, Aurora on the Amazon cloud performs comprehensive checks for quality compliance, playability of audio and video at ingest, after encoding, after transcoding and before playout. Aurora processes files on AWS S3 storage and optimizes EC2 compute instance resources usage on the AWS Cloud.
AS-10 PAD Delivery Specification
Aurora now includes support for the AS-10 PAD Delivery Specification, offering the ability to test content that is delivered to French broadcasters for compliance. Broadcasters in different regions are starting to mandate new restrictions for files delivered from post-productions houses; the latest is AS-10 PAD in France. With support for UK-DPP and now AS-10, Tektronix offers post-production professionals a way to test content to ensure the delivery specifications are being met and to confirm content quality.
Aurora will be among the ground breaking video test solutions featured by Tektronix at IBC 2016. The premier annual event for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of entertainment and news content worldwide, the IBC exhibition is being held 9-13 Sept., 2016 in Amsterdam and is expected to draw more than 55,000 attendees from 170 countries and will feature products from over 1,600 exhibitors.
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