Cisco Introduces IPTV SLA

Cisco has introduced an IPTV SLA that is explained at this link. It provides monitoring of the IPTV broadcast flows through the IP network and delivers quality measurements, channel mapping, and route path analysis. It couples the multicast protocol with the video channel lineups in a monitoring system. It provides problem isolation by offering a common platform for network and video operators.

Cisco's IPTV SLA includes:

• IPTV Multicast Flow Tracing, which isolates IPTV multicast flows to the network segments responsible for transmission.
• IPTV Video-Quality Measurements for loss and latency that will result in video artifacts. This video measurement is correlated with the multicast IPTV flow tracing for problem correlation.
• IPTV Channel Mapping, which reports the channels that are carried in a multicast flow through the network in order to determine the impact of anomalies in the IPTV transport network.
• Health Checks based on rules created on a per flow basis. Violations to this rule set, such as path or pps, will result in notification to the network operator.
• IPTV-Related Multicast Flows, which automatically finds related multicast flows carrying similar video content to help operators isolate problems and determine their impact.
• Integrated Router Statistics provide multicast diagnostics is provided on a per-flow basis, including router and switch statistics.
• Northbound Notification, which integrates with the service provider's service manager applications by providing northbound trap notifications of IPTV flow alerts.

It appears that Cisco is providing some important capabilities for monitoring IPTV traffic. From this description, it is focusing on the network layer. Other approaches, such as those offered by Brix, Ineoquest, and Bridge Technologies provide monitoring at the video layer by decoding the MPEG packets and identifying the visual impact directly.

I think that Cisco's IPTV SLA is a useful tool, but I also think that video layer monitoring on an end-to-end basis will also be required to get a full picture of video quality.