New “Surfmeter” App Revolutionizes Quality Control in TV Entertainment
The following press release describes how AVEQ’s own Surfmeter technology was integrated successfully within a mobile application used by a large national ISP. Read our success story below, and get in touch if you want to find out more about our products!
Vienna, Austria — In 2020, Magenta shook up the Austrian market with the launch of the Entertain Box 4K. While the commercials for the new hardware flickered colorfully across the screens, a lot was going on behind the scenes. With the Surfmeter app, researchers at T-Labs and Vienna Entertainment Platforms have achieved a major breakthrough in quality assurance.
The newly developed app assesses the quality of a TV stream exactly as the customer would. The app is installed on a service technician’s smartphone and measures the streaming quality at the customer’s premises. Volker Libovsky, CTIO of Magenta Telekom in Austria says: “The Surfmeter app now enables us, for the first time, to record qualitative measurements that are comparable with the customer’s actual perception. This allows us to ensure consistent quality and implement selective adjustments to provide our customers with the best possible entertainment on all networks.” The first field deployment took place at Magenta in Austria.
Idea for Surfmeter app arose spontaneously in Berlin
Something great can come from a modest beginning. The initial spark for the Surfmeter app also happened more or less by chance, describes Daniel Lentsch, Technical Lead Entertainment Backends at Magenta Telekom: “The idea came about relatively spontaneously during a visit to the Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs) in Berlin in July 2019. Until now, there was no way to incorporate a person’s subjective feelings about a particular video into a rating. We wanted to change that and took the first steps while still on site.”
Know-How Knows No Boundaries
When it comes to technical developments, know-how knows no boundaries — especially not state or federal borders. And so, researchers and developers from Germany and Austria came together for the planning of the Surfmeter app. The creative minds came from T-Labs and TU Ilmenau in Germany, as well as from the Magenta Entertainment team and the startup AVEQ in Austria. “The Surfmeter app was developed as part of the ‘EVIC – Enhanced Video in the Cloud’ project,” explains Peter Pogrzeba from T-Labs.
First field deployment at Magenta in Austria
With the Surfmeter app, entertainment providers can measure the quality of their streams and enter the results into a database. This makes it possible to quickly and easily map values from all regions in the footprint to keep customer satisfaction at a high level. The use at the customer is quickly explained: “If streaming problems occur, a service technician has the possibility to measure the streaming quality on-site with the Surfmeter app. He receives a so-called MOS value from 1 for bad to 5 for excellent,” says Daniel Lentsch. Since the app also collects geodata, weak cells in the network can be quickly identified.
About Magenta Telekom
Magenta Telekom (T-Mobile Austria GmbH) is a leading provider of internet and mobile communications, entertainment and business solutions in Austria. The company has around 2,500 employees and generated revenues of 1.28 billion Euro in 2019. The company offers ultra-fast broadband via fiber optic cable and mobile internet, entertainment and the latest technologies for digital life.
About AVEQ GmbH
AVEQ GmbH is a spin-off of Ilmenau University of Technology (Germany). The company was founded in 2018 and is located in Vienna and Berlin. With over ten years of experience in the area of video streaming and web services, AVEQ focuses on customer-centric measurements in its solutions. For AVEQ, “Quality of Experience” – the customer’s experience – is the driving force. The product range of the young company is characterized by innovative measurement technologies and unique solutions.
Press contact: Werner Robitza (CEO AVEQ GmbH), werner.robitza@aveq.info
