Monthly iCap Reporting and Announcements

This month, EEG's iCap Networking Engineering and Support team is providing a preview of a new feature which will be launched more fully in 2016: a comprehensive, customer-accessible dashboard providing live (and historical) uptime metrics across the iCap Realtime Captioning cloud and related services.

In addition to the new public Dashboard which will be accessible to all registered iCap users, EEG will be launching a private and personalized uptime tracker for owners of all iCap encoders, hardware or virtual, linked to a Broadcast Plus support package. The report will be especially designed to help broadcasters covered by new FCC rules comply with record keeping requirements on closed captioning system functionality inspections and uptime.  More information and full previews of this feature will be coming soon.

This month's report is a preview of the new features in the simplified form of a data listing compiled from a number of the sources which will be available on the completed Dashboard. We wanted to share it as soon as possible though, since the data shows the power and reliability of the iCap system at scale, and many customers have been requesting these types of numbers. In November 2015 (the month covered in this report), the iCap network was used to send nearly 2 million minutes of live program captioning!

iCap Authentication Provider Servers

These servers are used to handle initial login to iCap, encryption key assignment, and intelligent traffic balancing. iCap logins will perform as normal as long as any of these servers are available, so individual server lines showing less than 100% uptime do not prevent clients from using iCap - there have been no episodes of system-wide unavailability in the past 12 months.

iCap Relay Traffic Servers

These servers are used for reflecting the bulk of iCap media (reference video and audio, plus captioning) between encoder/content provider facilities or cloud sites and realtime transcriptionists. Clients are assigned to a specific server based on a combination of factors including current load, geographic location, prior arrangements with caption providers, and Broadcast Plus service status.

Observed Customer Data

This final table shows anonymous uptime data from a small set of randomly collected customer connection logs. This data is used only for the purposes of system improvement by EEG and is represented exclusively with all identifying information stripped (except a broad definition of what geographic region the traffic originated from).

This statistic shows over a 30-day period how often a given encoder ID was maintaining a stable and healthy connection to iCap; the number does not indicate whether active use was planned during any given time period. The data also doesn't tell us much about the reasons an encoder may not have been connected - individual customer encoders are usually inacessible due to localized and specific causes, such as customer ISP downtime, system power-downs, or software restarts. From time to time, encoders will also migrate to different iCap servers offering the best service based on their internal software algorithms.

A more detailed version of this information will be available to Broadcast Plus subscribers, on a formally documented and per-encoder basis, with a target feature delivery date in the first quarter of 2016.