Fergie's Tech Blog

IPTV Testing Methodology Goes Standard

Ray Le Maistre writes on Light Reading:

If you hadn't heard of MDI (Media Delivery Index) a month ago, there's a good chance you'll know about it now, especially if you went to this month's Globalcomm show in Chicago.

That's because it was the tag du jour of some of the major test and measurement firms that were touting their IPTV capabilities on the show floor.

MDI is a measure of video quality, in the same way that MOS (mean opinion score) is used as a measure of voice quality. It provides an "at-a-glance" indicator of IP jitter and packet loss using data gathered by network probes, and is expressed as a "delay factor" and "media loss rate."

But it's nothing new: Specialist IPTV test firms like Bridge Technologies Co AS and IneoQuest Technologies Inc. have been singing from the MDI hymn sheet for months, and in IneoQuest's case, years.

posted by Fergie @ 6/16/2006 09:36:00 AM