To monitor the quality of the transcoding that MediaFLO does and to help diagnose what might be responsible for any problems, three screens on the display wall in the operations center are devoted to each channel. The West Coast channels are on the right side of the video wall. For each channel, the top screen shows the channel as it arrives from the TV network, the second shows the transcoded channel before it’s sent to the satellite uplink (which is about a 10 second delay), and the third shows the channel as it’s received on phones (with another two second delay).

There’s a test phone at every transmitter site with a remote connection back to the operations center. The engineers sample the RF signal and record details like the frame rate received and the number of errors, so that if there’s a complaint, they can diagnose where in the transmission path the problem is likely to be.