Press Release
New iTrinegy AppQoS Media Monitoring Module will help companies avoid World Cup viewing penalty
Cambridge UK, June 10 , 2010 — iTrinegy, the Networked Application Performance Lifecycle™ experts, announces an enhanced HTTP media monitoring module for its AppQoS networked application monitoring technology, enabling organizations to identify which users are watching streaming media over their network - an activity that could be illegal if no TV licence is obtained for viewing at the premises!
The AppQoS product range now offers deep packet inspection so that network managers and security specialists can clearly identify the type of media being accessed over their network. The captured viewing information is presented in either a tabular or graphical format to show which IP addresses (and therefore, which users) are viewing a particular type of media (e.g. streaming media/online TV) and the web sites they are visiting to stream this data.
“With the World Cup imminent we believe the availability of this latest update is timely. Many British football fans plan to watch the World Cup online at work. What they and their employers may not realise is that if they choose to use computers provided by the business, they may be in breach of TV Licensing regulations”, says Frank Puranik, Product Director at iTrinegy.
The reason why companies may, inadvertently be falling foul of TV licensing laws is because the TV Licensing Agency advises that “...if your staff or customers watch television programmes as they are being shown on TV, including live World Cup games, then your organization needs to be covered by a TV licence. This is the case whether they use a laptop, computer, TV set, mobile or any other device owned by your business”.
However, if employees watch television programmes at work as they’re being shown on television using their own devices, and they haven’t connected them to the mains or an aerial, then they’re covered by their own home TV Licence, if they have one.
Frank said “The quickest way to ensure an organisation doesn’t fall foul of this regulation is to either buy a licence or impose a blanket ban on anyone watching TV while at work. Either way, if you are an owner, director or manager you need to know what is being accessed over your company’s network in case, at worst, it is illegal or more innocently (but probably, more significantly) impacting the performance of other networked applications. AppQoS gives you that visibility.”
Examples of how AppQoS is being deployed to police network activity includes a major multi-national company that uses the product to monitor traffic over one of its major 34 MB links in order to enforce its strict “essential use only” policy and a UK SMB is using the tools to keep their expensive bandwidth usage under control.
Frank concludes “More generally, companies don’t all have the same policies regarding what their staff can and cannot access, but it’s smart to know exactly what traffic is travelling over the network to identify if non-essential activity such as watching TV or updating Facebook is having a detrimental effect on other business-critical applications running over networks”.
A full explanation regarding TV Licensing at business premises can be found at the agency’s web site http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/business-and-organisations/
