Featuring Bridge Technologies’ second-generation OTT Engine, the new PocketProbe for Android delivers digital media monitoring and analysis capability right to the engineer’s pocket. Expanding its compatibility with popular formats, PocketProbe now provides comprehensive analysis of HLS, Smoothstream, RTMP and MPEG-DASH streams, with at-a-glance displays that present data in instantly-understandable form through graphic displays and multiple overlays.

Simen Frostad, chairman of Bridge Technologies, said, “PocketProbe epitomises our approach to monitoring capability, which we believe should be ubiquitous and completely transparent, allowing the engineer to analyze every point in the network, at any time, in any depth of detail, and from any location.”

PocketProbe contains the same sophisticated OTT Engine found in Bridgetech’s award-winning VB1, VB2 and 10G VB3 series digital media monitoring probes, enabling confidence validation and analysis of http adaptive bit-rate streams using the same metrics. PocketProbe can be used by service engineers and operational staff to test real world behaviors with a wide range of operators. Accurate status of bit-rates used and profile changes is displayed in real time, giving instant understanding of provider delivery capability. Together with hardware probes used pre-cloud, the post-cloud location of the PocketProbe enables excellent correlative understanding of CDN and provider abilities. PocketProbe is easy to use, with a fully automatic set up: once the stream url is input, the app finds all related profiles and validates the consistency. Features include:

• Display of the profile’s programmed and actual bps
• Validation of chunk size against download time
• Alarms on manifest syntax and oversizing
• Alarms on sequence age disparity and non-updates of sequence for live streams
• Graphic display of real chunk behavior

Like its iOS counterpart, PocketProbe for Android is available in two versions: the free application can validate five HLS streams in round-robin mode, provide analysis and manifest consistency alarms, play back media in the various profile bit-rates, and graphically display the actual chunk download patterns and bit-rates. The full version also offers the ability to validate HDS, SmoothStream, RTMP and MPEG-DASH manifest files and store 25 streams with all profiles.