Switched Digital Video (SDV) - Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism

The Switched Digital Video (SDV) requires a reporting and monitoring systems (let's call it SVRM for simplicity) for the telco operators to make decision about program expansion, network design and to determine where to roll out new programming and advertising to increase advertising.

The SVRM architecture consists of a receiving agent, a database system, a reporting agent, and a User Interface, preferably a Web based UI.

The receiving agent gets it's data from a Switched Video Session Manager server (SVSM) and tracks the subscriber’s set-top-box activity, channel ownership, and performance diagnostics data in real-time. The scalability should be factored in when designing the SVRM to support large number of SDV servers, support large number of subscribers to monitor and support unlimited number of channels. For example, some vendors provide monitoring capacity of a 1,000,000 subscribers per single SVRM server, 100 SDV servers and unlimited number of channels.

The data base system stores all data collected by receiving agent in an organized and secure way with fault tolerant ability. As an example, database can be built on a Oracle database that resides on a secure and fault tolerant RAID array storage systems.

The reporting agent builds customized report from database system providing traffic patterns and viewership statistics data. The report allows cable operators to optimize program lineups and enhance utilization of network infrastructures. Through viewership statistics, the operators can identify the available and niche programming, also called “long tail content”.

The operator can use SVRM to monitor both switched and broadcast programming in real-time to measure channel popularity and identify additional long tail content best suited for SDV. The SVRM monitoring can be extended to a broad range of performance and reliability metrics to optimize network utilization, and for service assurance purposes. It can also be used to identify trends, such as unanticipated viewership changes, that can impact system performance and content delivery before they impact subscribers.

The following diagram depicts a typical SVD Reporting and Monitoring architecture.

The Switched Video Session Manger (SVSM) is the network element that captures the subscriber data activity. It provides session and response management support. The set-top-boxes send channel change requests signals to SVSM over cable network. The SVSM then interacts with local edge QAM device to set up and tear down mappings. See my article: IPTV - software behind SDV for SDV architecture.