The TAG Multiviewer empowers users to design and manage highly customizable mosaic layouts for real-time monitoring of multiple video and audio channels. The intuitive drag-and-drop system allows channels-filtered by criteria such as label, service, device, or group-to be easily arranged within the mosaic. Users can further personalize their layouts by setting unique names, choosing background colors or images, and leveraging tags for efficient filtering and organization, even in large-scale environments.

Each tile within a layout can be configured and customized with up to eight Under UMDs, tally, audio, text and more, providing clear visual indicators and status information for each channel. The interface supports advanced features such as dynamic UMD updating, on-screen alarm displays, and flexible background customization via color picker or image upload. Once configured, layouts can be quickly assigned to outputs, ensuring that operators have a tailored, actionable view of their monitored streams.

Technical Overview:
In addition to its intuitive layout management and customization features, the TAG Multiviewer delivers robust technical performance designed for demanding broadcast and streaming environments. Each MCM instance supports up to 16 independent mosaic outputs per server, with every mosaic capable of displaying up to 100 input sources (tiles) simultaneously. Operators can fully customize the size and arrangement of each tile-including side-by-side split-screen views-and assign up to 32 independent audio pairs per mosaic transport stream output. Each tile supports up to 16 audio tracks and 8 Under Monitor Displays (UMDs), with tally integration via TSL protocol or the TAG API, and dynamic UMD updating for operational flexibility. Mosaic backgrounds can be set using either video or image files, and output resolutions range from SD and HD to UHD, with simultaneous support for uncompressed, compressed (TS), and HLS outputs-including both unicast and multicast delivery.

The system is engineered for ultra-low latency, real-time monitoring, and headless operation, ensuring seamless integration into automated workflows. Advanced features include on-screen clocks, count up/down timers, streamed JPEG thumbnails for each input, and specialized display modes such as Carousel and Penalty Box for dynamic monitoring scenarios. Custom tile layouts can be configured and assigned to outputs through the Layouts Configuration interface, which supports powerful filtering by tags, groups, and channel attributes for efficient management at scale. These capabilities make the TAG Multiviewer a scalable, responsive, and highly customizable monitoring platform, ideal for complex, mission-critical operations.

Zero Friction® is TAG’s unique licensing model designed to provide users maximum flexibility and long-term value. With Zero Friction®, every license unlocks the entire TAG platform- across all workflows, stream types, and functionalities. This means operators, engineers, and administrators can use the same license for probing, monitoring, multiviewing, decryption, recording, QC and more without being limited by function-specific entitlements.

Licenses can be dynamically assigned in real-time, adapting to changing operational needs across teams, locations, or events. Whether scaling up for a live sports broadcast, shifting resources for cloud distribution, or enabling new QC features, Zero Friction® ensures that customers can instantly take advantage of TAG’s full functionality without additional procurement cycles.

This model not only lowers operating costs by maximizing utilization of existing licenses, but also eliminates technology debt by guaranteeing that all new TAG features are available the moment they are released. The result is a future-proof operation that can scale seamlessly while ensuring operators always have access to the industry’s most advanced monitoring and multiviewing capabilities.

Operator Console is TAG’s intuitive control panel designed for day-to-day operations. Instead of requiring access to system configuration, operators can directly interact with a visual mirror of the live mosaic via a touch-supporting interface. This allows them to switch predefined layouts, choose feeds per tile, listen to source audio, control appearance of alarms and trigger display changes instantly- without accessing the underlying configuration.

By separating operational control from system setup, Operator Console reduces the chance of human error while enabling operators to act quickly in live environments. Teams gain an accessible, easy-to-use tool that streamlines workflows, keeps focus on content, and eliminates unnecessary complexity.

The result is more efficient daily operations, reduced training needs, and a safer way to manage live monitoring environments. With Operator Console, TAG gives operators the power to manage multiviews dynamically and confidently, while engineering teams retain control over core configurations.

Lens is TAG’s hierarchical view for organizing and monitoring large-scale deployments. It allows operators and engineers to group sources by any label- such as location, provider, region, or content type- and view them in a structured tree with clear error severity indicators.

By visualizing errors in a drill-down format, Lens makes it easy to see not only where problems occur but also their impact on the overall workflow. Operators can quickly navigate from a high-level system view down to the individual source, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).

This approach simplifies oversight of thousands of sources, giving teams a logical, intuitive interface for monitoring health across complex operations. With Lens, TAG enables customers to scale confidently, maintaining quality while cutting through operational complexity.

Smart Recording is TAG’s built-in forensic tool designed to give you complete visibility into stream errors. Using a cyclic First-In-First-Out (FIFO) method, the platform constantly records streams you define, ensuring that the critical moments leading up to and following an error are always captured.

When an event is detected according to your defined thresholds, Smart Recording saves not just the video and audio, but also the relevant metadata – from channel details and IP addresses to OTT manifest files, DVB tables, and closed captions. These recordings are exported to an external FTP, allowing you to control storage and retain comprehensive records without impacting system performance.

This powerful feature enables post-mortem analysis of errors across video, audio, and metadata, giving teams the insights needed to troubleshoot issues quickly, identify root causes, and continuously improve workflows. By ensuring nothing important slips through, Smart Recording transforms error events into opportunities for learning and operational excellence.

Advanced User Management in TAG’s Media Control System (MCS) allows administrators to define different user profiles, granting or restricting access to resources such as streams, monitoring actions, and system controls.

By creating structured layers of access, organizations can prevent human error, enforce operational consistency, and ensure that each team member interacts only with the tools and content relevant to their role. This is especially valuable in large-scale deployments where multiple operators, engineers, and administrators must work simultaneously.

The result is a controlled, secure environment that scales seamlessly, supports organizational workflows, and maintains system integrity without sacrificing efficiency.

The TAG API is a JSON-based, open interface that exposes 100% of the platform for configuration, control, and monitoring. It allows operators, engineers, and developers to integrate TAG seamlessly into existing broadcast and media workflows without additional licensing requirements .

With the API, teams can automate repetitive tasks, reduce manual configuration, and build custom dashboards or control panels tailored to their needs. It enables interoperability with leading orchestration tools, NMS platforms, and third-party broadcast controllers, creating a unified operational environment.

By supporting complete external control over monitoring, multiviewing, and visualization, the TAG API empowers organizations to streamline workflows, reduce complexity, and scale operations efficiently. This flexibility ensures TAG fits seamlessly into diverse technical ecosystems while maintaining reliability and transparency.

Technical Overview

TAG’s API framework provides multiple integration layers, each optimized for specific workflows and use cases across the MCM and MCS platforms. All APIs are JSON-based, open, and designed for easy interaction with external systems and automation tools.

API 2.0 serves as the foundation for MCM GUI and core functionality. It uses numeric-based indexes (IDs) that reflect the system’s internal database structure, offering direct access to configuration, control, and monitoring parameters. This version is ideal for standard operational automation or when MCM operates standalone, without an external control layer.

API 3.0 was developed to manage visualization and multiviewer control. It simplifies the automation of display behavior by mapping monitored channels to output tiles dynamically. This allows third-party systems to control what is visualized – for example, assigning or removing a channel from a tile automatically – without requiring manual reconfiguration.

API 4.0 is designed for broadcast controller integration and mimics early NMOS (Networked Media Open Specifications) principles. It introduces a sender-receiver model, using UUIDs instead of IDs to define and control components such as ST 2110 or SMPTE 2022-6 video, audio, and ancillary data streams. This API enables external broadcast controllers to integrate seamlessly with TAG in static multiviewer environments, where channel configurations are fixed but require interoperability across devices.

API 5.0, developed for TAG’s Media Control System (MCS), enables deep control and data sharing between MCM and MCS instances. It introduces functionality for statistics aggregation through Redis databases and supports advanced orchestration features such as stacking, multi-instance control, and resource synchronization. While API 5.0 overlaps with MCM capabilities, it is primarily used when the system is integrated with MCS for centralized management.

Across all versions, TAG’s APIs are open, extensible, and interoperable, ensuring continuous compatibility with evolving broadcast standards and third-party systems. This layered approach gives users the flexibility to choose the right level of control – from granular configuration to full broadcast orchestration – without rewriting or rebuilding their workflows.

TAG’s Decryption feature enables secure, scalable, and efficient handling of encrypted video streams by integrating directly with leading Key Management Systems (KMS). Supporting standards such as AES-128 (CBC/CTR), BISS-2, CENC for multi-DRM, and DVB Simulcrypt, it allows operators to monitor both live and VOD content across broadcast, IPTV, and OTT environments.

By connecting with KMS partners including Verimatrix, Irdeto, Huawei PlayReady, Axinom, and others, Decryption ensures seamless key exchange and removes the need for additional DRM infrastructure. This simplifies workflows while maintaining security and compliance.

The system scales easily across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments, delivering high-throughput decryption with minimal overhead. Operators gain the ability to probe encrypted streams in real time, ensuring fault detection, regulatory compliance, and service reliability without adding costly hardware.

Decryption empowers broadcasters, operators, and content providers to maintain full visibility into protected content, reduce operational friction, and ensure both revenue protection and viewer trust.

Technical Overview

TAG’s Decryption integrates at the key-management layer to unlock encrypted contribution and distribution streams for real-time probing and visualization- without adding proprietary hardware or re-packaging steps. The system supports common CAS/DRM and encryption schemes used across broadcast, IPTV, and OTT, including AES-128 (CBC/CTR), BISS-2, DVB Simulcrypt, and CENC (for multi-DRM workflows). Keys are retrieved via direct integrations with leading KMS / DRM providers (e.g., Verimatrix, Irdeto, PlayReady ecosystems, Axinom), enabling secure key exchange and rotation aligned to provider policies.

Decryption operates on live video and across ABR ladders (HLS/DASH), ensuring each rendition can be probed for video/audio/metadata integrity with minimal added latency. For broadcast/uncompressed pipelines, decryption runs inline with TAG’s 10-bit processing path so downstream QC tools (waveform, vectorscope, histograms) and monitoring checks remain accurate after content is unlocked.

Operationally, all decryption states and failures (key request errors, entitlement/rights mismatches, unsupported ciphers) are surfaced as events and exposed via the API and MCS for dashboards and automations. Deployments can be on-prem, cloud, or hybrid, and scale horizontally-multiple TAG nodes can share KMS connections and policies while preserving per-stream isolation and auditability. Because decryption is handled within the TAG platform, engineers can immediately correlate protected-content health with SCTE markers, captions/subtitles, SSIM/Content Matching, HDR metadata, and more-turning encrypted workflows into first-class monitored paths rather than black boxes.

Penalty Box is TAG’s dynamic error-focused view. Instead of displaying every monitored stream, it automatically pulls only those that exceed thresholds you define – such as video freezes, audio drops, or metadata mismatches – into a dedicated multiview.

This ensures operators immediately see the problem streams, without wasting time scanning through dozens or hundreds of healthy ones. Penalty Box continuously updates in real time, so once an error is resolved, the stream disappears from the view, keeping focus sharp and uncluttered.

By concentrating only on streams in error, Penalty Box reduces the number of “eyes on glass” required, minimizes CPU and screen usage, and accelerates root-cause identification. The result is leaner operations, faster response times, and lower costs – all while maintaining the same level of quality and reliability.

TAG’s Content Matching creates a unique fingerprint for every video frame and audio envelope, allowing streams to be compared across multiple points in the workflow – regardless of resolution, bitrate, or framerate. This ensures content remains correct and consistent, even after processing or manipulation.

Operators can use Content Matching for key applications such as:

• Latency measurement: frame-accurate across any two points in the workflow.
• Feed comparison: validate delivery paths, affiliate feeds, and blackout enforcement in real time.
• Ad insertion validation: confirm SCTE-35/104 triggers and ad placements with frame accuracy to protect revenue.
• A/V alignment: detect drift and verify multichannel or multi-language mapping.
• Root cause analysis: pinpoint and visualize the source of signal errors for faster troubleshooting.

By automating these checks, Content Matching reduces “eyes on glass,” lowers operational costs, and gives media companies confidence that every piece of content is delivered correctly. From live sports to regional playout, it safeguards both workflow efficiency and revenue integrity.