Data analytics Archives - TAG Video Systems

Monitoring is just the beginning

ilana@tagvs.com — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 15:38:41 +0000

TAG’s Realtime Media Platform goes beyond monitoring

If you google ‘multiviewing’, a mere 847,000 search results pop up. TAG Video Systems is right up there, on the first page. Which is great. However, although TAG is known for its exceptional ultra-low latency multiviewer adaptable to every media workflow, multiviewing is only one small component of the TAG Realtime Media platform – a comprehensive toolset that manages and elevates media performance across operations at any scale, setting TAG in a class of its own. TAG’s unique differentiators enable broadcasters and media companies to unlock significant operational efficiency and flexibility, so we’ve picked a few, outlined below.

Content Matching

Content Matching is TAG’s unique and award-winning process that ensures content is delivered in real time to its intended destination without errors or discrepancies. Content Matching identifies potential issues and confirms signal integrity, leading to increased broadcaster confidence and a high-quality viewer experience.

Content Matching creates a unique fingerprint for video streams to match them across the entire media distribution path. It accurately identifies and correlates audio and video uniqueness regardless of the resolution, bitrate, or framerate, thus enabling a match between two or more points in the workflow. This technology notifies users when the first content inconsistency occurs allowing them to get to the root cause of problems faster and troubleshoot more efficiently. Workflow complexity is dramatically reduced, allowing operators to work more efficiently by reducing “eyes-on-glass” while ensuring consistent delivery of quality content.

Content Matching can be applied to the most requested applications including frame-accurate latency measurement, SCTE ad insertion, AV alignment and audio channel drift validation.

Integration of Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM)

TAG’s platform is designed to deliver an unparalleled viewer experience by combining advanced Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS) tools. Based on Content Matching Technology, TAG now supports straightforward, reference-based QoE measures like Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), an industry-leading algorithm that mimics human visual perception to assess video quality in real time. SSIM is seamlessly integrated with TAG’s Content Matching technology allowing for precise comparisons between reference (e.g., source at acquisition) and other points along the workflow (e.g, before/after encoders/packagers). This standardized evaluation simplifies quality assurance across workflows, ensuring a consistent and high-quality viewer experience.

However, TAG’s commitment to quality goes beyond SSIM. The platform also includes comprehensive QoS features that monitor video and audio parameters, signal loss, jitter, latency, and compression artifacts. Together, these tools provide operators with a comprehensive view of stream quality, ensuring both visual and technical fidelity throughout the entire media workflow.

TAG Bridge

TAG Bridge solves two major problems. It helps reduce the bandwidth needed to deliver uncompressed video from the receiving device to a remote location for multiview generations, and it eliminates the need to process the same source multiple times.
This technology is designed to handle various transport methods, such as 2110 uncompressed video or compressed MPEG TS streams, and many others.

TAG’s Bridge removes the complexity of routing the same stream across multiple locations ensuring efficient resource use with minimal bandwidth and compute requirements. This proprietary technology enables an operator to receive a source once – including video, audio and metadata, analyze it for quality, compliance and errors, pre-scale it to the destination tile size and display it directly on any TAG system, anywhere, regardless of input source, size or format. Compute resources are drastically reduced, and a minimum amount of network bandwidth is consumed, freeing up capacity for the customer.

Managing HDR in Live Broadcasting

High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology is redefining the visual standards of television, offering unprecedented brightness, contrast, and color that dramatically enhance the viewing experience. Across Production, Playout or Distribution, multiple HDR formats are here to stay and co-exist for a while. All have different color volume characteristics, many formats include metadata, and SDR will be present in many places. All these need to be managed correctly end-to-end to ensure that the viewer’s TV makes the right choices in displaying them, and that they arrive with appropriate quality and accuracy. They may traverse many codecs and transports; they may incorporate multiple HDR formats in their composition and provide HDR and SDR versions for some time to come. Monitoring this complexity requires adaptive, flexible, and data-driven tools that provide a comprehensive view of all elements in real time, which can accommodate any combination of source characteristics and provide probing/monitoring / alarming, visualization and rich content data from network to essence in one solution.

TAG Video Systems empowers broadcasters with the tools they need to navigate the HDR transition without dependency on expensive, dedicated hardware. By enabling the integration of multiple HDR formats into a single HDR multiviewer mosaic, these solutions offer an accurate visualization of all sources regardless of type, full monitoring of all metadata and behavior. This allows broadcasters to ensure the highest quality standards while also exploring new opportunities for content monetization through enhanced viewer experiences.

Zero Friction® Licensing

TAG ‘s Zer0 Friction® is an agile licensing model that fits both CAPEX and OPEX budgets, unlocking a world of possibilities with every TAG functionality at your fingertips, in every application and workflow. Zer0 Friction allows dynamic sharing across functions, workflows, and locations maximizing efficiency and adaptability in real time. This level of flexibility ensures that customers can adapt quickly to changing requirements, using the same TAG license to visualize a production in one location today and monitor an OTT data point in a different location tomorrow.

Conclusion

TAG is known for its multiviewers, but that’s just a part of the TAG story. The TAG Realtime Media Platform empowers customers to adapt to the rapid changes in content delivery workflows while ensuring consistent quality and operational efficiency. TAG provides the tools to scale operations efficiently and adapt to new challenges. This article gives a summary of some of those tools, unique to TAG.

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Future of Broadcasting Technology: Hybrid Environments

ilana@tagvs.com — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 13:49:42 +0000

In the hybrid environments emerging today as a popular choice for cloud adoption, broadcasters and other media organizations are using a mix of cloud resources with on-prem hardware and methodologies to address their technical and business requirements. This shift can be transformational for a media organization when planned and executed well.

By shifting key processes and workflows to the cloud, broadcasters, content providers, and distribution and delivery service providers can move away from the constraints of traditional hardware-dependent systems and take advantage of greater resource availability and scalability. They can leverage familiar, consistent automation tools powered by data-driven decision-making to streamline workflows and simplify their operations.

Given the value of these capabilities in a rapidly changing and intensely competitive landscape, one might expect that a full cloud migration lies in every media organization’s future. For many businesses, however, a pure departure from on-premises operations is unlikely. As the industry moves forward, hybrid approaches offer the various rewards broadcasters and media companies seek from the cloud, as well as benefits that can be derived from using systems and workflows situated on-premises.

Why Hybrid Is Winning

Adoption of cloud-based solutions involves numerous considerations across a media organization, and the hybrid approach allows each business to balance those considerations and pursue a strategic path toward more efficient and agile operations.

Employing Existing Resources

One reason hybrid environments will dominate going forward is that media organizations worldwide have already invested in on-prem hardware and infrastructure, both SDI and IP, that currently support familiar and functional workflows. And, when processes or workflows are migrated to the cloud, it is typically an incremental undertaking, not a wholesale replacement of existing systems. In many cases, the business will identify an ideal or opportune use case for a cloud-based solution and begin the shift there.

Minimizing Risk and Reducing Impact

When the time comes to integrate and implement a cloud-based solution, some businesses choose to begin with an on-premises deployment. To maintain control, minimize risk, optimize the system, and provide time and opportunity for internal teams to learn, they may test or even maintain the cloud-based system within a private cloud run on their own infrastructure.

Further requirements that might affect the decision to take a process or service to the cloud include augmenting staff and tools to support this transition, dedicating time and resources to training, investing resources in integration of existing systems with cloud-based solutions, and potentially re-architecting existing applications for the cloud environment. For some applications, it’s simply more desirable to maintain audio and video locally rather than in a remote virtual environment.

Businesses that choose to run software-centric solutions in the public cloud rather than on premises can eliminate hardware infrastructure and associated maintenance costs while reducing administrative costs. Working with a major cloud provider, they also gain access to robust data security measures, such as data encryption, access controls, and built-in redundancy, that protect both content and customer data.

Tapping Into Cloud Strengths

The cloud commonly brings advantages such as improved productivity and the ability to adapt and innovate with relative speed, but these well-known benefits must be balanced against potential performance and cost issues, and their impact on different use cases. Thus, broadcasters may opt to shift lower-value services to the cloud first and then follow with higher-value or higher-visibility offerings if the model delivers compelling operational and economic benefits.

Once a workflow or operation is established in the cloud, broadcasters and media organizations can automate manual tasks and leverage AI and machine learning to optimize content production and distribution. To support those workflows, they can scale compute resources up and down at will to address peaks in demand or enable new business opportunities. Rather than overprovision or underutilize resources, businesses working in the cloud can use and pay for just the compute resources they need.

How to Optimize Hybrid

There is no one-size-fits-all way to implement cloud-based solutions in a hybrid model. At various media organizations, different systems and devices are integrated across ground and cloud to support critical workflows and services. Within this complex environment, advanced monitoring systems help to ensure that, even across a wide array of broadcast tools and software, an organization can maintain essential probing, monitoring, visualization, and data-driven decision-making capabilities.

The 100-percent software, IP-native TAG Realtime Media Platform does just that, making it easy for media organizations to streamline workloads and improve operational efficiency while maintaining a pristine user experience. Regardless of deployment model, be it on-premises, hybrid, or cloud, the TAG platform delivers the same performance and functionality.

Supporting all ground and cloud formats, the TAG platform creates a holistic ecosystem for monitoring and management of all streams by providing deep probing and analysis within a user-friendly interface, as well as extensive user-defined notifications. Analyzing vast quantities of data to identify systemic issues and detect repetitive errors, it provides insights that aid organizations in consistently delivering outstanding content. As a result, broadcasters can monitor content with fewer resources, reducing their operational costs even as they improve productivity.

Enabling dynamic resource allocation on demand, the scalability of AWS cloud further optimizes monitoring and management processes. In combination with AWS services, the TAG platform’s probing and monitoring capabilities allow broadcasters and other media organizations to automate the protection switching of video content based on any set of defined thresholds.

The Journey Ahead

As media organizations move to leverage the cloud and software-centric, IP-based solutions in hybrid environments, advanced monitoring plays a critical role in enabling both operational efficiency and a high standard for viewer experiences.

If your business is embarking on this journey, and you’re interested in how the TAG Realtime Media Platform can help you achieve your operational and business goals, let’s talk!

The post Future of Broadcasting Technology: Hybrid Environments appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

Maximizing Resources: Keys to POST Luxembourg’s Success in Evolving Media Landscape

ilana@tagvs.com — Tue, 07 May 2024 12:14:58 +0000

Managing growth and providing highest Quality-of-Service with a lean team

POST Luxembourg stands out as a case study in maximizing resources to manage growth and provide exceptional quality with a limited technical talent pool. POST Luxembourg is the number one television operator in the Grand Duchy, serving 43% of the total TV market. In addition to its residential TV audience, POST Luxembourg offers streaming services to select hotels, retirement homes and even the country’s correctional facilities. POST Luxembourg is also the nation’s primary IPTV provider.

The Challenge: Reducing Complexity, Placing Customers First with a Lean Team

POST Luxembourg’s mission to provide the best possible viewing experience involves managing a complex web of content aggregation and delivery. On the technical side, this includes monitoring 450 individual streams, encompassing every aspect of the delivery chain. From the moment content is acquired, through encoding, descrambling, and final playout, guaranteeing signal health at each stage is paramount. “Operational efficiency is critical in a market our size,” explains Romain Heynen, System Administrator, “We operate with a team of four, but we are always focused on the viewer’s experience and we never cut corners at the expense of the people we serve. We need solutions that are straight-forward, easy-to-operate and maximize our team’s expertise.”

Maintaining the health of its content is paramount to POST Luxembourg’s success. The team is on call 24/7, so having pertinent, appropriate, accurate and timely information is essential for them to act quickly and effectively in the event of incidents or outages, no matter where they are or the time of day. “We always must have a 360-degree view of everything happening in our headend, from signal acquisition to customer delivery,” explains Heynen.

The network initially integrated TAG’s Realtime Media Performance solution in 2010, initially for real-time monitoring, visualization, and problem detection, but the system has evolved to keep pace with the organization’s growth and needs. The TAG platform generates information in real-time about the quality of the video and audio, the availability of all the channels, and if outages or errors occur any time of day or night. If an error occurs after hours – a team member receives an alert on his/her mobile phone or receives a call from the NOC identifying the channel and the problem. The team member can open POST Luxembourg’s VPN, connect to the headend and see the video wall and the problem live.

TAG’s multi-viewer dashboards also provide a unified view across the delivery chain, while its sophisticated alerting and data analysis tools give their engineers a unique advantage. Nicolas Altir, Telecom Engineer, emphasizes, “The most important window into our service is the one our subscribers see. Whether it’s a traditional set-top box or a streaming device, TAG gives us that critical perspective in real-time.”

Key Benefits

Proactive Problem Solving for an Agile Team: POST Luxembourg’s core team relies heavily on automation and efficiency. TAG’s configurable alerting, color-coded severity indicators, and the “Penalty Box” feature mean less time wasted on manually diagnosing issues. “Knowing immediately if the issue is a transient glitch or a service-impacting outage is critical for our 24/7 operations,” says Altir. “We can prioritize accordingly, maximizing the impact of our limited staff resources.”
Innovation and Interoperability: Flexibility is a superpower for a modern broadcaster. “Evaluating new codecs, ensuring seamless integration with descrambling systems, or preparing to launch UHD content – TAG’s open architecture means we never feel locked in. We can test different solutions within our actual workflow, making decisions based on what truly works, not just vendor spec sheets,” notes Heynen.
Data as a Foundation for Success: Seamless integration with Elasticsearch transforms TAG into a powerful analytics tool. Altir explains, “Analyzing historical trends doesn’t limit us to immediate troubleshooting. We can spot recurring issues with specific sources, assess vendor performance over time, and even predict equipment failures proactively. This not only translates to less downtime, but it allows us to budget for the future with confidence, knowing exactly where our investments will have the biggest impact.”
Beyond Broadcast: Ready for the Future: As POST Luxembourg evolves alongside shifting audience habits, TAG’s monitoring capabilities adapt seamlessly to streaming-specific protocols and delivery methods. They’re able to support both traditional television service and over-the-top (OTT) offerings through the same platform. This ensures a consistent level of service regardless of how viewers choose to access content, while also enabling them to monitor a broader range of modern cloud-based distribution infrastructure.

Partnership for Success

Heynen reflects, “Technology is only as good as the people behind it. TAG understands our challenges because they’re focused on the same goal as us – delivering an amazing experience for the end-user.”

Conclusion

POST Luxembourg’s ongoing success exemplifies both the power of the right technology solution and a dedication to operational excellence. Their journey with TAG underscores how finding a vendor who understands both current needs and the long-term vision can produce benefits over time. In a rapidly evolving industry, POST Luxembourg positions itself for the future by always keeping sight of its true ‘north star’: the experience of the people who rely on it for information and entertainment.

The post Maximizing Resources: Keys to POST Luxembourg’s Success in Evolving Media Landscape appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

Full Demo Overview

danna@tagvs.com — Sun, 12 May 2024 09:35:07 +0000

Dive deeper into TAG’s advanced monitoring capabilities as we walk you through each solution/ workflow demonstration in detail. Gain a deeper understanding of TAG’s unique solutions for simplifying your workflows, mainatining agility and maximizing resources. Whether you’re interested in multi-format quality managagemnt, hybrid workflows, or SCTE monitoring, this review has you covered.

Get the full overview

The post Full Demo Overview appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

Ensure Seamless Content Delivery with TAG’s Content Matching & Latency Monitoring

noa@tagvs.com — Sun, 12 May 2024 11:45:55 +0000

Achieve unprecedented visibility and control over your entire media workflow with TAG’s Content Matching technology. This demo showcases how TAG measures end-to-end latency, audio-video synchronization, and other critical metrics, ensuring flawless content delivery across various formats, resolutions, and bitrates automatically.

TAG’s intelligent fingerprinting establishes a unique audio and video signature at the source (or a user-defined reference point), allowing it to accurately track and compare content at any downstream location. This ensures content integrity and enables precise latency and synchronization measurements, regardless of how the content may have been transformed.

The demo highlights how TAG aggregates content matching data, latency metrics, and A/V sync information from across the workflow. Integrate seamlessly with popular data visualization tools like Kibana, Grafana, or Kafka to gain valuable insights into potential bottlenecks, delays, or inconsistencies, empowering you to optimize your operations for maximum performance.

The post Ensure Seamless Content Delivery with TAG’s Content Matching & Latency Monitoring appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

Optimize Compliance and Revenue with TAG’s Advanced Probing & Monitoring

noa@tagvs.com — Sun, 12 May 2024 11:33:16 +0000

This demo showcases TAG's award-winning capabilities for two critical aspects of broadcast workflows: caption/subtitle monitoring and SCTE trigger monitoring. Discover how TAG ensures quality and maximizes monetization with intelligent language detection, real-time validity checks, and accurate SCTE analysis.

Ensure the best viewer experiences and streamline compliance with TAG’s award-winning caption and subtitle monitoring. This demo showcases real-time validity checks to eliminate errors, plus TAG’s innovative language detection capabilities. Not only can TAG identify multiple languages automatically, but it also intelligently compares the captions to language-specific dictionaries for unparalleled accuracy. These tools, recognized with both a Product of the Year and a Best of Show Award at NAB 2024, bring a new level of efficiency to captioning workflows.

Maximize your ad revenue potential with TAG’s in-depth SCTE trigger monitoring. This demo highlights how TAG precisely tracks SCTE triggers (both SCTE-35 for compressed and SCTE-104 for uncompressed feeds). TAG’s analysis pinpoints invalid triggers, missed triggers, and expired windows, ensuring that every ad opportunity is flawlessly executed and fully monetized.

All error logs across any amount/locations of TAG probes can be aggregated and displayed via 3rd party open source data visualization tools like Kibana, Grafana, Kafka and more.

These tools enable large data centralization for a unified operation view, but more importantly, learning and data-induced decision making for workflow optimization.

The post Optimize Compliance and Revenue with TAG’s Advanced Probing & Monitoring appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

TAG & Skyline Dataminer Integration Walk-through

noa@tagvs.com — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 15:37:05 +0000

This presentation will explain how the integration of TAG V.S. probing, monitoring, and multiviewing software and Skyline’s DataMiner AI-powered network management, orchestration, and OSS platform dramatically expand your view of your system and how to keep OTT services running smoothly.

Get the guide

The post TAG & Skyline Dataminer Integration Walk-through appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

TAG’s NAB 2024 Plans Include New Technologies and Benefit-Rich Integrations to Simplify and Optimize Media Workflows

ilana@tagvs.com — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:58:30 +0000

The company will highlight advanced data capabilities across all media operations, new quality of experience measurements, intelligent language detection, and HDR workflows

TAG has announced plans to show its most far-reaching capabilities to date at NAB 2024 in Booth W1655. A comprehensive monitor wall comprising the heart of the exhibition will demonstrate efficient, agile, and innovative quality at scale capabilities in all major media workflows. Highlights include new partner integrations, new intelligent language detection technology, added support for QoE measurements, an end-to-end HDR workflow, and a preview of an intuitive touch panel operator console that cuts through the complexity of configuring and operating a system. These new technologies will enable TAG users to deliver incredible quality at scale with even more intuitive, automated, and accurate tools.

Maximize Data Utilization – Live on the Show Floor
NAB visitors to TAG’s Booth will experience an interactive deep dive into the far-reaching potential of the Company’s monitoring and visualization capabilities. TAG will demonstrate, in real time, how dashboards can be easily built and customized with well-known open toolsets like Kibana, Grafana, and Kafka to address any level of detail and show how users can maximize the full extent of their data and gain invaluable insight from TAG’s Realtime Media Platform.

End-to-End HDR Workflow Capabilities
TAG’s end-to-end HDR workflow capabilities already extend beyond standard HDR visualization and now they will be shown with HDR up-conversion and down-conversion to facilitate combined SDR and HDR workflows. This increase in functionality supports deep real-time HDR end-to-end metadata monitoring providing users with a higher level of agility to achieve incredible HDR quality.

Elevating the Workflow Eco-System with Best-of-Breed Technology Partners – Integration Demos
Delivering the highest-level quality of service, the latest technology advancements, and viable options for business advancement – which are always TAG priorities, will be front and center as the company presents integrations with best-of-breed technology partners that illustrate customer benefits.

Amagi – TAG’s recent partnership with Amagi delivers more accurate and effective monitoring through TAG’s advanced all-software and cloud native technology. This integration, shown at a major industry event for the first time, implements TAG’s monitoring by exception capabilities and leverages its easy-to-use APIs to efficiently monitor and control a substantial number of channels enhancing the reliability of Amagi’s FAST and broadcast streams.

Dataminer – NAB attendees will also see a demonstration that seamlessly incorporates support for TAG’s platform into Skyline’s Dataminer media management platform. This integration simplifies deployment and configuration and increases end-to-end visibility, automation, and user control of large-scale TAG installations. Operators benefit from simultaneous insight into the status of their infrastructure from Dataminer, along with insight into the health of their content and live streams from TAG.

Streamlined Operations Control- New Operator Console
Brand new for NAB 2024 is TAG’s operator console preview. This new intuitive touch panel console displays the live multiviewer output as an interactive minimized version on any touch-controlled device. Operators no longer need to waste valuable time searching menus but can access pre-defined, customizable configuration and operational functionality with just a tap on the mosaic, dramatically removing overall complexity and simplifying day-to-day tasks.

In this console preview, operators will be able to instantly switch between multiple layouts on the entire multiviewer, or just one mosaic, should a change of event, operation or focus occur. Additionally, the operator can switch the content of a tile to a different source, a different channel, or a different stream by simply clicking on the tile. That control extends to audio, allowing the user to select one specific source and play its audio to verify a match.

QoE at Scale with advanced algorithms- Structural Similarity Index Measure
Based on TAG’s unique Content Matching Technology, the company now supports straightforward, perception based QoE measures like Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM). TAG users will be able to numerically compare the video quality before and after the encoder or between any two points in the workflow, and evaluate even the most complex, high-noise levels video based on the SSIM smart algorithm.

Automatic subtitles quality monitoring at scale- TAG language detection
This new TAG technology preview not only identifies the subtitles language but also calculates its quality with dictionary-defined precision. Users will be able to see the caption’s language and accuracy based on the relevant language dictionary in percentages, and this will allow them to accurately evaluate quality and compliance without needing to look at the actual subtitles, reducing overall eyes-on-glass.

The post TAG’s NAB 2024 Plans Include New Technologies and Benefit-Rich Integrations to Simplify and Optimize Media Workflows appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

POST Luxembourg Case Study: The Road to Optimized Quality of Service

ilana@tagvs.com — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 11:50:43 +0000

A NOC team journey to streamlined quality of service excellence: Explore the success story of POST Luxembourg in streamlining its video delivery services. With a focus on simplifying complex workflows, this customer’s journey highlights how a small team efficiently managed operations and enhanced service quality. Discover their experience leveraging TAG’s intuitive solutions to overcome resource limitations and achieve operational excellence.

At a Glance – The Players

POST Luxembourg is a multi-faceted, government-owned organization based in Luxembourg with roots dating back to 1842. Today POST Luxembourg falls under the remit of the Minister of Communications and serves as a telecommunications operator, provider of financial services, and interestingly, also issues all the postage stamps in the Grand Duchy.

Previously, POST Luxembourg offered internet access and telephone services for both landlines and mobile networks. In 2008, however, the organization took a leap of faith and launched its IPTV domain – with zero customers. Fast forward to 2024 and POST Luxembourg is now the number one television operator in the country with 43% of the total TV market. In addition to its residential TV audience, POST Luxembourg offers streaming services to select hotels, retirement homes and even the country’s correctional facilities.

The Challenge

POST Luxembourg doesn’t produce content, they receive it from many different sources, re-encode to fit the network and ensure that it’s compatible with other devices. At present they are monitoring 450 streams at all different points of measure from signal acquisition, encoding, descrambling and playout. Minimal loss from the source signal to the encode output is a necessity.

Luxembourg is one of the world’s smallest countries and one of the least populated in Europe. This limited pool of personnel resources leaves POST Luxembourg’s headend and its 450 channels to be managed by a tiny team of four. Romain Heynen, the System Administrator at the satellite and media services division of POST Luxembourg, says “We all need to be competent on the different systems we are using, so we are always looking for straight-forward and easy-to-operate solutions.”

Nicolas Altir is a telecom engineer at POST Luxembourg responsible for the IPTV headend. First and foremost, Altir is responsible for fixing any crashes that occur – quickly. Together, Heynen and Altir are half of a small team charged with running the television headend, ensuring the integrity of the content, and keeping it safe and on-air.

In addition to keeping the infrastructure operating smoothly during traditional business hours, Heynen, Altir and the team are on call 24/7, so having pertinent, appropriate, accurate and timely information is essential for them to act quickly and effectively in the event of incidents or outages, no matter where they are or the time of day. “We always must have a 360-degree view of everything happening in our headend, from signal acquisition to customer delivery,” explains Heynen.

Altir adds, “For me, one of the main advantages of the TAG system is that I see exactly what my customer sees. The TAG monitoring system puts me in the position of my customer, living through the audio and visual experience.”

The Solution

POST Luxembourg’s infrastructure is comprised of dozens of solutions from numerous vendors that all must demonstrate flawless interoperability for optimum performance, but the one they consider crucial for maintaining the health of its content is TAG’s Realtime Media Performance platform. POST Luxembourg has been using TAG since 2010, initially for real-time monitoring, visualization, and problem detection, but the system has evolved to keep pace with the organization’s growth and needs. Today it gives the team a quick view of the status of all 450 streams, provides them with insightful alarms to pinpoint problems as well as the ability to achieve deep stream analysis to identify uncommon complications. And, according to Heynen, “TAG also serves as quite an efficient tool for testing the interoperability of new codecs, encoders or other ways to handle video, thereby enhancing our proficiency.” In addition, TAG also provides POST Luxembourg with a powerful tool for monitoring audio levels.

How it Works

The TAG platform generates information in real-time about the quality of the video and audio, the availability of all the channels, and if any outages or errors occurred during the night. If an anomaly occurs after hours, or there is an incident that surpasses the minimal threshold of quality set by the customer – the team member on call receives an alert on his/her mobile phone or receives a call from the NOC identifying the channel and the problem. The team member can open POST Luxembourg’s VPN, connect to the headend and see the video wall and the problem live.

Reasons for alarms include missing video, absent PID audio, or if a data track is not present. The TAG system also controls the bitrate of each component and uses a color-coded system to indicate the severity of any problems. In addition, POST Luxembourg’s system includes TAG’s Penalty Box feature which alerts the team of audio, video, or data problems by placing the channel in the Penalty Box. If an encoder or channel goes down, the team is notified instantly with detailed information regarding the specific encoder, or channel so the issue can be rectified quickly and correctly.f an anomaly occurs after hours, or there is an incident that surpasses the minimal threshold of quality set by the customer – the team member on call receives an alert on his/her mobile phone or receives a call from the NOC identifying the channel and the problem. The team member can open POST Luxembourg’s VPN, connect to the headend and see the video wall and the problem live.

One of the more recent developments allows POST Luxembourg to dig deeply into a stream’s history via the tight integration between TAG’s platform and Elasticsearch. This integration provides deeper insights over time and allows the team to see which channels or sources are experiencing consistent issues, or degradation over time. It allows for forensic or predictive analysis leading to optimum workflow performance and improved business practices.

“We integrated TAG into an Elasticsearch cluster, via Redis agent,” said Heynen, ”which was very straightforward and will be useful as we move ahead with future plans. Access to Elasticsearch on our TAG system is extremely valuable and provides us with information that translates to a significant advantage. We can monitor our audience, measure popularity of the content, and receive reports that tell us which devices consumers are using, all crucially important as we move more toward OTT. We now have a history of past events, our delivery, and quality of service over time.”

POST Luxembourg also benefits from TAG’s tight integration with Dataminer which augments the organization’s reporting and orchestration processes.

Looking Forward

POST Luxembourg plans to expand streaming services and also add more 4K to reduce latency on sports channels. The organization is also looking into more modern and efficient codecs. Apart from that, POST Luxembourg plans to migrate low audience channels to the cloud reducing on-premises equipment and maintenance costs and increasing efficiency.

According to Heynen, “Our goal is to remain the number one operator in Luxembourg’s TV market and to grow our offerings with services like 4K. In addition, as the market switches to other types of consumption such as streaming services: YouTube, Netflix, and so on, we must ensure our subscribers choices are accommodated. We plan to support MPEG DASH as our playout format and integrate that into the TAG solution.

“In all these processes we see TAG as a great tool which can help us improve over the next few years.”

The post POST Luxembourg Case Study: The Road to Optimized Quality of Service appeared first on TAG Video Systems.

TAG Enriches Replay Creation with DreamCatcher Integration

ilana@tagvs.com — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:56:38 +0000

Support for replay system opens the door to greater choice, unlocks significant functionality and streamlines operations for first adapter, Texas A&M

TAG has announced that its Realtime Media Platform now supports Evertz DreamCatcher replay technology. DreamCatcher is a premiere IP-based replay system ideal for stadiums and other stationary sport venues. Integrating DreamCatcher into TAG’s platform opens the door to deeper data integration, unlocks significant functionality, and gives replay users access to expanded choice when evaluating best-of-breed multiviewer options. The integration was launched in November 2023 and has since been adapted by Texas A&M University.

“TAG always has customers’ needs top-of-mind,” explains Robert Erickson, VP Sales Americas. “We’ve Integrated Evertz DreamCatcher technology into our multiviewer so our customers have the opportunity to enjoy TAG’s best-in-breed multiviewer and compliment the industry’s widely used replay system.”

This tight integration is another example of the TAG platform’s interoperability with best-of-breed solutions. TAG’s IP and COTS-based open architecture allows the platform to work with DreamCatcher as well as systems from numerous industry leaders, including EVS, Nevion, and Imagine. Access to this wide array of tools provides users with the agility they need to build end-to-end workflows that deliver the highest quality content.

Integration with DreamCatcher enables users to take advantage of all of TAG’s monitoring, probing and visualization capabilities, but also allows text to be added on top of the video on the TAG multiviewer for an extremely cost-effective, feature-rich replay solution. The combination of TAG’s multiviewer and Evertz’s DreamCatcher allows six different metadata labels to be shown including the current time, video timestamp, clip name, clip ID, play status, playlist name and play time – data that is essential for dedicated replay operators to avoid human error, create content and execute their jobs successfully in real-time.

The first adaptor of the integrated solution is Texas A&M. Already a long-time user of TAG’s Realtime Media Performance platform, Jonathan Kerr, Chief Broadcast Engineer at 12th Man Productions – Texas A&M Athletics’ award-winning production department, explained the benefits of the integrated solution, “At Texas A&M, we have one of the largest football stadiums in the country. We’ve been using TAG’s multiviewer with DreamCatcher for several weeks now, and it’s been great. We use a lot of clips and everything we do is planned down to the second. Being able to give our producers the ability to see the DreamCatcher data on our TAG multiviewer allows them to see when a playlist is going to end, when a clip is going to end, and how long the video has been going; all invaluable information that enhances our production values and elevates quality.”

Kerr continued, “We have a total of six DreamCatchers, four of which are dedicated to football. Now, with TAG’s integration, it is possible for our producers, directors, and everybody in the control room – in addition to our operators, to see the metadata on every output in front of them. They don’t have to search somewhere else when they’re trying to see how long a video has been playing or how much it has left.”

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