iBroadcast Can Significantly Improve Operational Efficiency

iBroadcast is an invaluable tool for broadcasters and satellite, terrestrial, cable and IPTV operators, looking to improve their operational efficiency.
In its role as an end-to-end, multi-vendor network management system/operational management system iBroadcast provides four key areas of decision support to streamline the operations teams through reduced operator workload and improved control and monitoring capabilities.

Prevent mistakes from happening
If the information available to operators is incomplete or inaccurate, there is a strong possibility that they could be drawn into making the wrong decision and taking the wrong action which could increase the impact of an issue. iBroadcast will automatically assess the event in real-time and present valuable insight to the operator to assist them to rapidly overcome the problem.

Give intelligent warnings
The interoperability between iBroadcast and the systems, equipment and applications it is able to control and monitor enable it to automatically assess the impact of an issue and only raise an alarm when operator action is required. This reduces the workload of the operators by ensuring that they do not have to deal with false or nuisance alarms or issues which should be dealt with by support teams. It also enables iBroadcast to evaluate the status of parameters and intelligently adjust alarm thresholds based on equipment behaviour and alert when an unusual change is detected.

Quickly identify problems and their causes
As an operational management system, iBroadcast consolidates the information from disparate systems and equipment to provide operations teams with the real-time status of the operational platform, from end to end. When an abnormal event occurs, iBroadcast becomes the focal point and primary tool for troubleshooting, diagnosing the problem and presenting the root causes. The control capabilities facilitate a decisive response with corrective action taken directly through the iBroadcast user interface.

Provide Correct Response
When an abnormal event occurs, operators need to decide how to respond to minimise the impact of the event. Based on the information available to them, they will have a perception of the cause of the event and the action they should take to overcome it. But before they act, they are likely to consider the consequences of their actions and balance this with the severity of the issue, before reaching a final decision and reacting. This decision-making process takes time and in a service interruption situation the time to solution is critical. iBroadcast is able to continuously monitor the entire operational platform, enabling it to correlate information, determine the root cause of issues and present the most appropriate resolution to operators.

Chris Barlow, Astec CTO, reported: "The decision support capabilities of iBroadcast significantly reduce the time taken to resolve an issue and in many cases can automatically take the appropriate action with no operator intervention, removing indecision and delay from the process."

About iBroadcast: In real time, iBroadcast provides real-time control and monitoring, alarms, root cause analysis, advanced analytics, web-based reporting, off-air service monitoring, workflow management and trending. All these features can be viewed through a single, consolidated dashboard that puts you in complete control of your broadcast platform.

www.astecsolutions.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online.

(JP)