Tektronix, Inc., a market leader in broadcast and cable video test, monitoring and analysis solutions, today announced that it has assembled the industry’s most comprehensive line of solutions that enable television broadcasters, cable operators and other video service providers to comply with the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which requires that commercial advertisements be no louder than the programming they accompany.
With the recent signing of the CALM Act into law, video service providers now have a year to quiet their overly loud commercials, or face potential fines. Given that broadcasters, cable operators, satellite providers and major telecom carriers now offer literally hundreds of channels, penalties could be substantial.
“With the passage of the CALM Act, broadcasters, cable operators and other video service providers urgently need solutions, and Tektronix is ready to help with a full suite of products for every situation,” said Eben Jenkins, general manager, Video Product Line at Tektronix, Inc. “Tektronix has led the industry for decades with advanced video and audio monitoring capabilities, and we have drawn on this expertise to create a line-up of solutions ideal for addressing loud commercials.”
The key for video service providers to address loud commercials is to identify and alert on them. Without scalable monitoring equipment, they have no insight into the volume levels at which the commercials are encoded, and consequently cannot identify loud commercials until after they run. Tektronix’ full line of solutions monitor commercials as they run, enabling video service providers to identify overly loud commercials, so that they can then be re-encoded at a lower volume. Once re-encoded, the commercials can be checked again for compliance before running.
The company’s comprehensive line of loudness detection and monitoring solutions currently includes the following:
The WFM6000/7000, WFM8000, WVR6000/7000, and WVR8000 Series waveform monitors and rasterizers. These have been recently upgraded to expand their previous loudness measurement capability. The upgrades include capabilities such as an Audio Loudness Meter, an Audio Loudness Session Display and the industry’s first audio loudness monitoring of Dolby Digital Plus audio, among others.
The Sentry digital content monitor. The award-winning Sentry is the only product today that can simultaneously monitor hundreds of channels in real-time, enabling cable operators and other multi-channel video service providers to comprehensively and continually monitor their entire channel line-up to identify loud commercials.
The Cerify content verification software. Cerify is the world’s leading solution for the automated quality control of file-based content and is ideal for identifying loudness issues in video-on-demand (VOD) programs. Recent upgrades to Cerify include support for long and short audio loudness tests per the ITU-R BS. 1770 standard and support for true peak level tests per ITU-R BS.1770.
The VQS1000 Video and Audio QoE software. This proven, award-winning software was recently upgraded with new audio loudness measurement capabilities as specified by the ITU-R BS.1770/1771 standards – which make it a powerful analysis tool for the detection of loud commercials. This software is ideal for analyzing a single program in real time to correlate QoS errors with QoE errors, or analyzing a pre-recorded Transport Stream file when troubleshooting network problems.
