V-Factor Competitive Advantage October 2008

End-to-End Solution  Headend to CPE monitoring is a great value proposition  Control the delivery chain across multiple realms:  Video realm: Headend  Network realm: Core/Access network  User realm: CPE  Allows controlling the delivery of value-added services and content  Allows faster root-cause fault analysis by segmenting the delivery chain  But what about the input to the delivery chain?

Source Video Analysis Existing solutions  What operators use for source quality control today  Nothing at all  Subjective tests  Manual quality check (technician, golden eye)  Network/Transport stream-based monitoring solutions  Full-reference video test solutions  Open questions  Scalability: How can I monitor 100s of channels in parallel?  Efficiency: Does my quality assurance process leverage my infrastructure and expertise?  Objectivity: How questionable is my quality assurance process?  Repeatability: – fatigue, expert opinion, quality test sampling, etc…

Source Video Analysis V-Factor  V-Factor is ideal to validate source video quality  Automated source video testing  Pre- and post-encoder monitoring  Managed monitoring solution (Q-1200)  Emulates Human Visual System (HVS) – high correlation with subjective tests  Repeatable, objective results  Non-intrusive and real-time  Video Mean Opinion Score (MOS) – similar to voice/audio test  Additional metrics to facilitate issue identification  Blockiness  Blur  Jerkiness

Network impairments  Loss  Jitter  Bandwidth A/Video artifacts (source, compressed)  Blockiness  Blur  Pixelation, bad audio  Freezes, black frame Human Vision System model Score Transport issues  Sync  Multiplex  Bandwidth In order to be accurate and pertinent, A/V content artifacts and network - A/V transports impairments must be detected. Q-Advisor Correlation

Network impairments  Loss  Jitter  Bandwidth A/Video artifacts (source, compressed)  Blockiness  Blur  Pixelation, bad audio  Freezes, black frame Human Vision System model Score When the stream is encrypted, content is not accessible Transport issues  Sync  Multiplex  Bandwidth Only network and A/V transport metrics are available Without correlation, only network and A/V transport impairments can be monitored. Correlation between upstream and downstream metrics remove this limitation. Q-Advisor Correlation

Network impairments  Loss  Jitter  Bandwidth A/Video artifacts (source, compressed)  Blockiness  Blur  Pixelation, bad audio  Freezes, black frame Transport issues  Sync  Multiplex  Bandwidth Network and A/V transport impairments are monitored downstream for all encrypted programs. Content artifacts are monitored upstream before encryption. Q-Advisor Correlation Symmetricom patent pending solution overcomes all limitations when the video contents are encrypted. It combines both DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) in the headend and correlation downstream using MPEG2TS time stamps Content metrics are captured in the headend Network and A/V transport metrics are captured in the network

Time stamps are used for synchronizing downstream and upstream metrics for each program (patent pending) Q-Advisor V-Factor ® Aggregation/Correlation Loss Model Entropy Content Probes (w DPI) Codec type, I/B/P/S, Quantizer bandwidth, video quality, etc Network Probes (w DPI) Transport Stream analysis (PCR, Out of sequence), network jitter, loss Correlation Engine TSi = I-Frame TSi = Packet Loss Packet Loss : I-Frame Human Vision System model

V-Factor vs MDI Network conditions MDI indicates good video quality while V- Factor indicates poor video quality Both indicate good video quality

V-Factor vs MDI Variable Bitrate – Symmetricom Lab Video – Spiderman  Standard Definition  Video Coding: H.264  Audio Coding: MPEG-4  Encoder: SW  Streamer: Tektronix  Bit rate: 4% Variable  Q-400 –Video Jitter Buffer: 50 –Audio Jitter Buffer: 50 –Quantization: 36 MDI metrics (MLR-DF) are not a reliable video quality metric on VBR

V-Factor vs MDI Variable Bitrate – Major MSO Live Network Same source content with CBR encoding (top) and VBR encoding (bottom) V-Factor is suited for both CBR and VBR content. MDI is designed for CBR content – Alarm flood for VBR content V-Factor is suited for both CBR and VBR content. MDI is designed for CBR content – Alarm flood for VBR content

V-Factor vs MDI Variable Bitrate – Major MSO Live Network Same channel before (top) and after (bottom) encoder fault isolation. MPEG-2 quantizer value set to 30 (top), and adaptative 7 to 23 (bottom) V-Factor can detect headend issues even in the network. DPI provides content monitoring when MDI provides network monitoring only.