The atmosphere at IBC 2025 was defined by urgency. The media industry is navigating a period of unprecedented transformation—a market we call “bananas”—driven not just by new technology, but by an existential pressure to deliver more content, for less money, with better quality.
As TAG’s Zero Friction Officer, Kevin Joyce, stated, this creates a perfect storm where technology vendors must step up to be strategic partners. “They need to reduce costs by a significant factor… the quality has to be darn good. That’s the table stakes to get into the game.”
Our presence at the show was dedicated to showing how the TAG Realtime Media Platform has evolved beyond multiviewing to become the core strategic tool for meeting this dual mandate of pure-play cost reduction and critical quality differentiation.
The Third Generation: Monitoring as a Workflow Strategy
After 17 years in IP, we’ve definitively moved past the “does this work?” phase. We are firmly in the Third Generation of IP Workflows, characterized by mature APIs, seamless co-opetition, and a foundational need for integrated monitoring.
The days of engineers only calling for a multiviewer when they needed a picture are over. With smaller engineering teams and rapidly changing content flows, monitoring can no longer be an afterthought; it must be a strategic requirement woven throughout the entire pipeline—from camera through to the CDN and device.
This shift in strategy requires three critical operational pillars: Control, Quality, and Visibility.
Feature Spotlight: Delivering on the Cost & Quality Mandate
Our IBC showcase introduced new platform features designed explicitly to address the central business challenge: how to eliminate human error, guarantee high quality, and gain efficiency at massive scale.
1. Granular Control for Scale and Security
Addressing the challenge of operating complex hybrid, cloud, and multi-department workflows—all while seeking efficiency—requires strict operational control:
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Advanced User Management (RBAC): To strengthen security and reduce the high cost of human error, our new Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) allows administrators to precisely segregate user access. Operators are limited to the specific inputs, outputs, and functionality relevant to their roles (e.g., live production vs. OTT returns), ensuring workflow integrity across the entire operation.
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Operator Console: This fully integrated, touch-friendly interface streamlines day-to-day management. It simplifies complex tasks by allowing operators to intuitively adjust layouts and switch sources without needing deep engineering expertise, optimizing the use of highly skilled personnel.
2. QC and Content Integrity: Guaranteeing Quality at Scale
Quality is the non-negotiable differentiator. Our latest innovations embed deep, integrated quality assurance directly into the operational view:
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QC Station: Real-Time, Integrated Deep Analysis: Our powerful new QC Station elevates quality control by providing real-time visibility to a wide array of vital data categories directly within the multiviewer. These include detailed Transport Stream (TS) or Over-The-Top (OTT) information, comprehensive Video and Audio metrics, SCTE data, and other stream diagnostics.
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New Vector and Waveform Scopes: With the newly added waveform and vector scope displays, you can now perform real-time deep color analysis, all integrated seamlessly as resizable tiles alongside your traditional video visualizations.
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Content Matching for Automated Confidence: This technology is key to eliminating costly mistakes. By placing probes at different stages, we generate a unique text fingerprint of every frame and audio sample. This ensures 100% certainty that the correct content is being played out. Crucially, by timestamping these fingerprints, Content Matching delivers highly accurate latency measurement between every processing stage, and verifies audio/video lip sync by comparing separate audio and video timestamps.
3. Total Visibility and Fast Root Cause Analysis
The fastest way to reduce cost is to cut the time spent troubleshooting. Our visualization tools are designed to surface issues before they impact the viewer experience:
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Lens (Feature Preview!): The highly-anticipated Lens feature is a quantum leap in operational visibility. This customizable, hierarchical metadata structure allows operators to instantly categorize and view the health of their entire system based on any criteria (e.g., Data Center, Region, Content Type). By visualizing errors in a drill-down heat-map logic, an operator can instantly pinpoint the problematic source and identify root causes by visual impact.
The IBC 2025 Takeaway
IBC 2025 proved that the era of experimentation is over. The challenge now is one of execution and scale. The commitment shown by partners and clients on the show floor—discussions that require more face-to-face time than ever—underscores a shared vision for the future: the media workflow must be agile, highly automated, and fundamentally software-defined.
The industry is moving from surviving transformation to profiting from it. By providing the tools for greater automation, deeper quality assurance, and faster root cause analysis, the TAG Realtime Media Platform is delivering pure-play cost reduction and critical quality differentiation that will define winners in this competitive market.
Thank you to everyone who visited our booth and engaged in these crucial discussions. We look forward to continuing the journey toward the next generation of media workflows.
