Is The PPM vs. Voltair Debate Over?
October the 28th, 2015
In his latest company blog post about the ongoing PPM vs. Voltairdebate, researcher Richard Harker tells us what he learned from an answer that Nielsen Global Engineering Chief Dr. Arun Ramaswamy gave during a recent Q&A at the 2015 IEEE Broadcast Technology Symposium.
Asked by an engineer attending the conference to “make broadcasters feel good” about turning off their Voltair units in light of Nielsen’s recently announced deployment of “enhanced encoding” measures, Harker reports Ramaswamy didn’t endorse the use of Voltair, but he also didn’t give any indication Nielsen plans to ban the unit.
In other words, Voltair users appear to be safe — for now. So is that it? Is the debate over? Harker says he doesn’t think so. “Is the [enhanced encoding] patch an interim solution while Nielsen looks for more effective improvements, or is this it?,” he asks. “If this is it, that Nielsen considers the problem solved, does that mean PPM is now truly ‘format blind?’ In other words, does PPM now work equally well across all formats and programming material? And why, if the solution fits on a USB memory stick, has it taken Nielsen two years to fix it?”
Read what else is on Harker’s considerable list of still unresolved concerns in the PPM vs. Voltair debate HERE.
