Imagine a typical Tuesday morning in New Jersey, as 9.30am sees suburban families tuning into Disney Channel to watch Handy Manny and his talking tools. What they got May 2, 2007 however, was hardcore pornography; a blunder for which cable company Comcast accepted responsibility. And it’s companies like Pixelmetrix that help prevent such blunders, without having to rely upon human monitoring of multi-channels on multiple screens – ensuring certain channels, like adult fare, are blank when they should be and that other screens, like 24-hour news, never go dark. As Pixelmetrix President and CEO Danny Wilson points out, facilities like SES-Astra’s headquarters in Luxembourg deliver 1,864 video, audio and interactive channels from a control room manned with just two personnel. “Content needs to be monitored to prevent mix-ups and to protect all-important advertising revenues.” As a slide entitled ‘Now you’re in trouble’ shows, content can leave the aggregator correctly classified, but in transition can all too easily drop to a Family rating and go out unchecked. “Liability varies by market – in Germany for example, the engineers would be held legally responsible, while in India the CEO would be deemed liable.” Wilson began his management career at Hewlett-Packard in his native Canada, later moving to Kobe, Japan, where he established HP’s Asia Business Centre – leading the development of the world’s first multi-port network monitoring system, implemented throughout Japan, by NTT. He went on to found Pixelmetrix Corporation, a Singapore-based company focusing on preventive monitoring for digital television and IPTV networks, providing equipment and network intelligence systems to television broadcasters for the management and monitoring of quality of service and quality of experience. Clients include CNN/Turner Networks, Viacom, Fox, CBS, ESPN, Disney, Univision, Telefutura, USDTV, HBO, NHK, Japan Telecom, KPBS, NTL, Sky PerfecTV! Japan, British Telecom, Canal+ and Télédiffusion de France. Using his favourite, and self-confessed over-used analogy, Pixelmetrix President and CEO Danny Wilson, compares the transferal of content to the bulk purchase of shoes. “At any stage of the transport of your goods, whether those goods be TV content or shoes, you need to check – did I get what I ordered, did I get what I paid for?” Wilson spoke to Television Asia Plus soon after his return from January 2008’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where he accepted an Engineering & Technology Emmy Award, Singapore’s first, from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) for its DVStation Transport Stream Analysis products. These are used by broadcast television networks, by cable and satellite program providers, satellite teleports, mobile truck uplinks, digital television stations and various other satellite facilities to assess the quality and integrity of their broadcast content. Wilson also shared his thoughts on the potential and implications of Internet Protocol (IP) technology and IPTV delivery. “The use of IP in television applications is truly exploding – from the studio, to headend, to end delivery via IPTV networks. While the basics of television have not changed, IP does represent a major technology transition. Certainly, paradigm shifts such as this come with their share of technical problems, which is why we are behind the IP transition through our expanding toolset” says Wilson. “There has been a great interest in IPTV from every corner of the world. A successful IPTV deployment, of course, requires a high bandwidth data path to subscribers and not every country has sufficiently advanced infrastructure.” He continues, “While IPTV networks have attracted a tremendous amount of attention and investment, to actually reliably deliver television over a shared IP network is fraught with trouble and difficulty. The years and years of television history have set very high expectations from viewers – and today those viewers have a choice. Nascent IPTV operators are faced with the difficult challenge of pulling viewers away from their existing cable and satellite services. A failure to offer the highest possible quality of experience will only result in lost viewers and lost profits. Building a robust network with a focus on quality management is essential to their success.”