IPTV providers still face multiple challenges in managing end-to-end quality on their networks, because of the technology’s many moving parts and the lack of standards, equipment vendors say.

“There are a whole bunch of ways for things to go wrong in an IPTV network,” said Calvin Harrison, VP of marketing and business development at IneoQuest, which makes quality and revenue assurance systems including probes and management software.

Much of the early emphasis has been on in-home wiring problems, but, in fact, there are still many issues that crop up in the network, Harrison added, especially as the relatively new technology scales for the mass market.

“Every time you add a video-on-demand server, or change encoders, there are potential problems,” Harrison said.

And then there are the unexpected rogue issues.

“We had video go down in a whole region because of a cherry picker that was blocking a satellite dish,” Harrison said. “We’ve had radar detectors interfere with satellite dishes so that when cars pulled into a parking lot, the signal was affected, and even riding lawn mowers cutting the grass around a satellite dish interfered with the signal.”

That’s why IneoQuest developed its probes in a range of sizes to go at different points in the network to test the video when it first comes in from a content provider to when it is encoded, transported to a local VHO and delivered over the last mile to the customer. Its software is designed to take information from all those probes and very quickly identify the source of the problem, Harrison said.

“Obviously, you don’t want to roll a truck to an individual’s home if the problem is a general outage,” he said. “We help identify the source of the problem more efficiently.”

At the NAB Show, Cisco’s quality pitch was based on its Digital Content Manager (DCM), which is using both Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) to improve the quality of the signal, said John Morrow, VP of strategy and business development at Cisco.

“The DCM can introduce noise into the system for testing purposes,” Morrow said. “It doesn’t take much to disrupt the video signal. A 7 percent degradation of packet loss will cause macroblocking and pixelization.”

The DCM is also used for local ad insertion, Morrow said.