Q. What products or services does your company offer?
Triveni Digital provides program guide and metadata management, content distribution, and video quality-assurance systems for the broadcast, cable, telco and IPTV industries. Our products are renowned for their ease of use, innovative features and cost-effectiveness. Working with leading industry partners, Triveni Digital is committed to providing an open and standards-compliant approach to the digital television market.
Our StreamScope product family comprises the industry’s most comprehensive suite of MPEG video quality-assurance tools. By ensuring that transport streams comply with standards and design goals, Triveni Digital products help DTV content providers maintain the highest-quality video and audio streams. Our tools simplify the complex issues in modern video distribution plants, making powerful troubleshooting and auditing capabilities feasible for often over-taxed technical staff.
Triveni Digital’s GuideBuilder PSIP/SI generators provide accurate metadata and standards-based program guides for broadcasters and DTV service providers. GuideBuilder enables customers to meet important FCC PSIP requirements, generate consistent DTV metadata and prevent errors. With more than 1,400 deployments around the world, GuideBuilder has been the leading DTV metadata management system for the past decade.
During the early phase of DTV broadcasting in the United States, there was active innovation and experimentation exploiting data broadcasting technology for hybrid content distribution. Triveni Digital has been by far the leading provider of such systems. With recent technical developments, including ATSC 2.0 and ATSC Mobile DTV and with emerging business concepts, we anticipate a new round of innovation exploiting hybrid content distribution systems, with consumer applications now the core area of focus.
Q. What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2013 NAB Show?
One of the key trends at the 2013 NAB Show, from a video and audio quality-assurance perspective, will be audio loudness monitoring. Given recent legislation in the United States with the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act and in Europe (EBU, AGCOM), loudness monitoring of commercials is a hot topic in our industry. Utilizing an advanced DTV loudness monitoring solution, broadcasters can monitor, measure, record and analyze DTV streams for variations in audio loudness. This makes it incredibly simple and cost-effective to maintain a high quality of audio for television services and comply with industry requirements and standards, including ATSC A/85, ITU-R BS.1770-3 and the CALM Act.
Additionally, the broadcast industry is at an important turning point. Viewers are getting more content through alternative distribution paths and on multiple devices. We believe that taking advantage of the trend for multiplatform distribution and viewing is both the key opportunity and key challenge that local broadcasters face.
Q. What’s new that you will feature at the NAB Show?
The StreamScope MT-40 and RM-40 DTV transport stream analysis and monitoring solutions with advanced audio loudness monitoring capabilities will be shown. Aside from ensuring high video quality assurance, all of our StreamScope models feature sophisticated loudness monitoring features that allow audio loudness monitoring and analysis following ATSC A/85. This enables broadcasters and program distributors to log and export accurate dialnorm and loudness measurements of broadcasts continuously and in real time, as well as perform immediate 24-hour spot checks of the audio streams, in order to comply with loudness monitoring legislation such as the U.S. Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act.
We will also be announcing a comprehensive set of new initiatives targeting the next phase of the local broadcast business. With an increasing array of viewing applications and devices, broadcasters are facing a more complex content distribution environment. Our strategy includes significant extension to GuideBuilder, making it truly “metadata central” for the future evolution of the broadcast plant. GuideBuilder 5.0, a complete modernization of the core GuideBuilder functionality, and the platform for future metadata extension, will be announced. In addition, we will talk about our Open MediaHub initiative, aimed at enhancing the distribution of local content to the home and our efforts to bring innovative viewing options for local content into the hands of consumers. ATSC 2.0 forms the technical underpinnings for these initiatives and for the next phase of innovation in the local media business.
Q. How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?
Triveni Digital’s StreamScope family of DTV monitoring solutions offers unmatched ease of use, as well as innovative capabilities such as the ability to perform 24-hour spot checks, to help streamline video quality assurance for broadcasters, cable, telcos and IPTV operators. In addition to providing engineers with a user-friendly graphical user interface for spot checks, StreamScope generates a timestamp and picture thumbnail during potential loudness violations so that engineers can instantly verify whether commercial content was present at the time of the violation and more easily determine the source of the error. The new spot check functionality enables engineers to analyze TV signals in the compressed domain and to verify the level of the audio in the same signal received by the viewer. Combined with the comprehensive depth of analysis available, these unique features make StreamScope the ideal DTV monitoring solution.
Our GuideBuilder PSIP/SI generator has been proven to accurately produce program guides and metadata for hundreds of TV stations. The next logical step is to extend the scope of the metadata gathered to enable broadcasters to create new services, monetize the data and generate additional revenue streams. This unique concept will be introduced at the 2013 NAB Show when we demonstrate enhanced metadata capabilities for GuideBuilder 5.0.
Q. What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?
NAB Show is the largest international broadcast tradeshow, so it’s a great venue for launching new technologies and products. Plus, the show provides us with the opportunity to catch up with our customers and peers in order to gain additional insights about the industry.
