Digital Nirvana Announces MonitorIQ RM For Monitoring Remote Hub Or Headend Sites

Digital Nirvana, a provider of leading-edge media monitoring and metadata generation services, today introduced MonitorIQ RM, a cost-effective video monitoring solution for remote hub and headend sites. MonitorIQ RM addresses the critical need among video distributors to replace the antiquated Slingbox and obsolete Volicon RPM solutions, which provided remote video monitoring at the edge.

A derivative of Digital Nirvana’s MonitorIQ, the most reliable and intuitive solution for broadcast compliance and media monitoring on the market, MonitorIQ RM is designed to monitor huge numbers of individual locations very quickly. Through MonitorIQ RM, cable operators and other video distributors can monitor hundreds of servers across a large geographic area to verify ad insertion, signal quality, service delivery, and proper programming placement at the local level — all from one or many central locations anywhere in the country. MonitorIQ RM allows technical and support teams to provide service and monitor high-profile events live from any central location without having to be on-site, which eliminates unnecessary truck rolls.

Through the MonitorIQ RM interface, technicians can see the entire channel lineup; change channels; and view, fast forward, rewind, and scroll through live or recorded content using remote control — all by region, ad zone, or even down to specific hubs or headends.

Technicians can also schedule recordings quickly through the electronic program guide in just a few simple steps, a feature that saves a significant amount of time when programming the same recording many times over. Rather than having to go to every channel individually to set up a recording, technicians can schedule it on different channels and in different zones instantly and simultaneously. For example, it’s possible to record, say, Bloomberg Television at 2 p.m. in a few locations on the West Coast and a few more in the Midwest and on the East Coast — all with one click.

MonitorIQ RM units contain simplified hardware and software aimed only at the remote-monitoring use case. With MonitorIQ RM, Digital Nirvana eliminated back-end functionality such as metadata, closed captioning, and SCTI monitoring, which are unnecessary for remote-monitoring scenarios. In doing so, Digital Nirvana was able to lower the cost of MonitorIQ RM units to a price that works for this application. Cable operators can afford to deploy hundreds of units to headends throughout their network with the same high scalability and highly secure, Linux-based operating system they’d get with the traditional MonitorIQ solution.

The benefits for video distributors and their technicians include:

• Fewer physical trips to hubs or headends to correct problems.
• More efficient operations because technicians no longer have to log in to multiple different systems to monitor or record different individual channels in different areas.
• Greater flexibility — Any person, no matter where they are, can monitor any zone at any time, which is especially helpful when people are absent due to illness, vacations, etc.

“We designed MonitorIQ RM only for remote monitoring, taking away the things people don’t need and simplifying the user interface to make it extremely easy to do the job with as few clicks as possible. Then we found a price and functionality point that makes it a smart solution to both purchase and deploy,” said Russell Wise, senior vice president at Digital Nirvana. “It’s especially pertinent in Volicon RPM and Slingbox remote monitoring-type situations, where we can bring access to live and recorded video at the touch of a fingertip from any place in the world.”