But with the widespread and growing use of IP in the media industry, other parts of the chain are no longer a natural environment for broadcast kit – and neither for dedicated hardware appliances.This poses a potential monitoring problem for media organisations in that ‘horses for courses’ may be a good idea in principle, but so is ‘the end-to-end solution’, and the two might seem incompatible at first. It’s not ideal, in other words, to have dedicated monitoring products in a broadcast rack, and specialised IP monitoring products elsewhere in the chain – because they don’t talk to each other, and the end-to-end collection and correlation of data therefore becomes impossible.

Simen Frostad, Chairman of Bridge Technologies