Latin America. The Mexican company Igson presented its new Signal Logger, a solution for detecting and recording SCTE 35 and 104 markers in real time that will facilitate the reconciliation between television channels, cable operators and content distribution networks (CDN) regarding signal blocking markers sent and received.
Emerging need
Communication between TV channels and cable operators and/or CDNs is increasingly migrating to IP. Signal blocking that was previously performed through DTMF tones is now mainly done by SCTE-35 markers in IP streams or SCTE-104 in SDI streams.
However, some television and cable operators are delaying their transition to signal blocking by SCTE markers claiming that it is easier to monitor DTMF tones since they are audible, although this loses all the advantages offered by digital insertion (Digital Program Insertion).
Until now, specialized teams to analyze television signals only detected the presence of the SCTE marker, but did not make a history of the insertion of these markers or analyze their content to determine if the information in the XML of the marker was correct.
The solution
To address this emerging and increasingly present need, they have developed Igson Signal Logger, a software for detecting and recording SCTE 35 and 104 markers in real time. It comes with 4 independent channels within a single user interface that can receive IP SIGNALS (UDP, SRT, HLS) or SDI and record the time of receipt of SCTE markers as well as their contents and save them in a database.
From Igson Signal Logger you can export the logs of the SCTE markers received for each channel independently and save them in a history. Apart from detecting markers for signal blocking, the software also detects and displays closed captions (608 and 708).
In addition, a complete e-mail alert system is included, which notifies the operator if no marker has been received for a while, if there is no presence of closed captions, if there is no presence of audio in the signals, or, also, can generate a warning e-mail every time an SCTE 35 or 104 marker is detected.
Igson Signal Logger can even record received signals in Transport Stream (.ts) format with SCTE markers embedded in the file and function as an SDI or IP signal witness recorder.
