Gold TS

Gold TS Protection is a new technology that makes monitoring for digital services quicker to set up and fault-tracking much faster, more accurate and secure. Developed exclusively by Bridge Technologies, Gold TS Protection includes all the checks specified in the ETR290 standard, but goes much further to include testing for critical conditions missed by ETR290.

Real-world protection for your services
Conditions like failures of the conditional access system, errors in the program guide, and unintended language changes seriously affect subscribers, but standard monitoring systems based only on ETR290 do not raise any alert for these conditions. Services protected by Gold TS catch these ‘ETR290-legal’ errors and provide a much more valuable real-world quality assurance for operators of digital media services.

Calibrate streams more accurately, in a fraction of the time
Two of the most time-consuming and inefficient areas in media monitoring are the calibration of the monitoring system, and fault-tracking. These two areas of inefficiency can have a cumulative impact, dragging down performance diminishing market acceptance of the provider’s service. Calibration of each stream is normally a long-winded process requiring a lot of operator input and expertise, and very few people in the industry fully understand all the intricacies of ETR290. Operators don’t always have the time or expert knowledge to set the correct values, and consequently the monitoring they can achieve is less accurate and efficient than it should be. Errors go undetected, false alarms add to the ‘chaff’ produced by the monitoring system, and personnel lose trust in the information provided by the system. Now, Gold TS dramatically simplifies the calibration process and makes it easy to set up highly accurate testing within seconds.

See where the fault is, instantly
When faults arise, efficient analysis and diagnosis is crucial for a quick resolution of the problem and the maintenance of good service levels. But in systems available until now, fault-tracking has required technical staff to wade through a large volume of analysis data, searching for the cause of the error. It’s even harder when the criteria set during calibration were imprecise and incomplete. But with Gold TS any and everydeviation from the Protection is instantly flagged for attention, and rapid fault-identification is made easy by a clear presentation of the error condition, with the deviation from the Protection values automatically highlighted, side-by-side with the correct values in the Protection. The clarity of the display helps the operator focus instantly on the cause of the error.

Protection above and beyond the industry standard
The automatic fault tracking provided with Gold TS is based not only on the explicit ETR290 checks but also includes otherwise ‘ETR290 legal’ error conditions which the operator must remedy to maintain good service levels. Once you’ve calibrated the stream using the easy Gold TS setup procedure, the stream is continually analysed and compared with the Protection. Gold TS encompasses all the outstanding ETR290 analysis technology developed to date by Bridge Technologies, but it goes above and beyond the ETR290 standard to deliver a much more accurate and comprehensive monitoring safety-net. Error conditions that fall through the cracks of ETR290 are caught by Gold TS.

Simplify the complexity, and do more with less
Gold TS not only makes it far quicker to calibrate streams accurately, but it also reduces the time-to-resolve errors typically by a factor of between 10-15. In operational terms, this means that maintenance staff can effectively monitor larger numbers of streams, because they spend less time setting up the calibration, and less time tracing and resolving errors. And that means subscribers to streams protected by Gold TS get all the time they want watching the highest-quality service.