Interra Systems will showcase new versions of its Orion monitoring and Baton QC platforms at the 2025 NAB Show, April 6-9 in Las Vegas.

The company will talk about new advances to its end-to-end video quality monitoring, content-aware quality control, advanced captioning, and in-depth video analysis tools. Harnessing the latest technologies, Interra Systems’ cutting-edge solutions enhance accuracy and efficiency, set new standards in QC and monitoring performance, and empower customers to optimize their workflows for peak video quality, the company said.

“We’ll be commemorating our 25-year anniversary at NAB 2025, where we'll present our latest innovations that enhance every aspect of media workflows,” said Anupama Anantharaman, vice president of product management at Interra Systems. “Our high-density, scalable solutions set industry benchmarks in media QC and monitoring, while our AI-driven tools demonstrate why global leaders in broadcasting and service provision rely on us to streamline workflows and deliver high-quality content faster."

Interra Systems will spotlight the Orion suite's latest capabilities, including a state-of-the-art multiviewer feature that transforms monitoring by enabling real-time visualization of multiple video and audio streams. This tool not only ensures seamless quality control and efficient workflow management but also allows operators to quickly verify alerts and resolve issues, thereby maintaining high broadcast integrity with greater accuracy and efficiency.

Alongside the multiviewer, Orion-OTT offers real-time monitoring of both linear and IP-based infrastructures and a comprehensive monitoring solution for live and VOD assets. Designed for flexible deployment across various environments and supporting an array of formats and protocols, the solution now features industry-first, all-frame decoding and deep-dive analysis for critical channels — significantly improving video quality checks and service playback.

In addition, the Orion suite now includes support for RHEL 8.10, Rocky 8.10, Dolby Atmos, IPv6, and more. The suite also boasts end-to-end ad insertion monitoring, which enhances workflow visibility from pretranscode to edge by comparing externally supplied ad scheduling information with actual DAI markers. Updates include closed caption availability reports, enhanced QoS and QoE scoring, comprehensive DRM integration, and flexibility in deployment models.

OCM, Interra Systems’ flagship video monitoring and management solution, provides quality tracing that monitors service quality and pinpoints issues across various stages of the video workflow. New features at the 2025 NAB Show will include advanced probe management and improved user group permissions, ensuring both efficient and secure video operations.

Interra Systems will also showcase Baton 9.2, now with enhanced autoscaling, enhanced video quality checks for 4K files, and new support for video quality, such as blank bars check and CIE color gamut check. It accommodates ITU-R BT.1702 2023 PSE video flash guidelines and contains algorithm improvements in QR code, freeze frames, duplicate frames, media offline, blockiness, defective pixels, video dropout, burnt-in text, shot transition, and more.

Baton 9.2 also supports Sony 360 Reality Audio, LZW compression in TIFF files, AV1 video format, BW64 audio, 24-bit LPCM audio in an MP4 container, sidecar Dolby Vision metadata files, an integrated Whisper model for audio language identification, and more. The latest Baton release also features significant installation process improvements for enhanced usability and resilience, along with UI support for dark/light themes, a new database manager tool, and enhanced diagnostics and alerts.

Interra Systems will also demonstrate advanced new updates to its award-winning Baton Captions solution — including caption placement as per scene change guidelines to avoid burnt-in text overlap and a host of QC and correction features. All of the updates take advantage of cutting-edge machine learning, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing technology.

A new UI layout comes with many new features, including an integrated relay workflow service; vertical zoom on audio waveform; and intelligent caption segmentation during review, which enables automatic splitting, merging, and resegmentation based on properties such as row count and character count while adhering to clause boundaries and natural pauses.

Interra Systems will also demo its Vega platform for standards compliance, debugging, and stream interoperability assurance. The platform has been enhanced to support an extensive range of compression standards, including the latest in VVC, AV1, HEVC, MV-HEVC, AVS3, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, ATSC 3.0, and more.

This broad compatibility reinforces Vega's role as a critical industry tool, Interra said. The platform's comprehensive capabilities enable media professionals to navigate the complexities of various video formats and standards with ease, ensuring high-quality content delivery across different platforms and devices.

Interra Systems will be in Booth W1921 in the West Hall of the LVCC.

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Interra Systems, a leading provider of end-to-end quality assurance solutions to the digital media industry, has announced that its longstanding customer, Swank Motion Pictures, is using the enterprise-class version of Interra Systems' BATON solution to optimize quality control and compliance. 

With the AI-/ML-enabled automated QC platform, Swank Motion Pictures can detect a variety of video quality issues at an early stage and streamline quality excellence.

"Swank Motion Pictures distributes a wide range of programming to customers over land and sea," said Mark Floyd, manager of digital lab services at Swank Motion Pictures. "Once our content reaches its destination, it has to work. Interra Systems' BATON provides us with the assurance that it will and that our customers will enjoy an optimal viewing experience."

The BATON QC platform can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises, providing Swank Motion Pictures with comprehensive quality, standards compliance, and regulatory and baseband checks for VOD content for linear and streaming workflows. The hybrid QC solution implements organizational QC policy to support a combination of automated and manual QC checks, improving workflow efficiency for Swank Motion Pictures. Built on a scalable architecture, BATON will ensure that as Swank Motion Pictures' requirements evolve, the platform will grow to match its needs. Complementing this, Swank Motion Pictures is also using Interra Systems' BATON Media Player to play, inspect, and verify audio and video content, the companies said. 

"We're thrilled that Swank Motion Pictures uses our BATON platform to QC their file-based content," said Ashish Basu, executive vice president, worldwide sales and business development at Interra Systems. "With the BATON enterprise application, Swank Motion Pictures has confidence to deliver outstanding-quality video content. BATON has been instrumental in helping them identify imperfections with detailed reports and an optional review process via the BATON Media player."

Interra Systems will showcase its leading content-aware media QC solution - BATON - including the latest BATON 9.0 engine, along with the company's full suite of powerful media QC, monitoring, and analysis solutions at the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 14-17 in booth W2720.

During the NAB Show, Muneesh Sharma, director of engineering at Interra Systems, will speak at the 2024 NAB Show Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference as part of the Quantifying Quality in Video Technology presentations. The session, "Elevating Video Quality With The Video Compression Score Metric," takes place at the 2024 NAB Show in the West Hall Meeting Rooms Level 2 (W220-W221) on Sunday, April 14 at 12:10 p.m. PDT.

More information about Interra Systems solutions can be found at interrasystems.com. 

CUPERTINO, Calif.—At the 2023 IBC Show, Sept. 15-18 in Amsterdam, Interra Systems will launch BATON 9.0, the latest version of its I-/ML-enabled automated QC platform, featuring a brand-new engine for enhanced performance, while offering support for new checks, formats, and features. To complement these upgrades, Interra Systems' BATON Media Player has also received performance and usability upgrades.

"Our BATON platform is constantly evolving, with new features and capabilities consistently added to stay ahead of the shifting media landscape," said Sanjay Mittal, executive vice president, product development, at Interra Systems. "BATON 9.0 represents a major leap forward for the platform in terms of performance, especially for those working with UHD content and Dolby Atmos. The end result is a better experience for users and more efficient workflows for our customers."

Deployed globally by broadcast, cable, telco, satellite, IPTV, over-the-top (OTT), post-production, and archiving companies working with file-based media, Interra Systems' BATON provides comprehensive quality and compliance checks for VOD content—in the cloud, on-premises, or as a hybrid solution—for linear and streaming workflows. Japan-based Innotech Corp. and South Korea-based Namsung Traders Co. Ltd. are among Interra Systems' prominent partners anticipating the launch of BATON 9.0.

"We are proud of our partnership with Interra Systems — serving as their distributor in Japan for file-based QC, stream monitoring, and encoder analysis solutions for more than 20 years," said Yosuke Kaburagi, managing executive officer at Innotech Corporation, Japan. "We are thrilled with the introduction of BATON 9.0 and believe it is a groundbreaking solution in more ways than one — designed for scale and performance, and representing a new approach for streamlining workflows. This new version of BATON incorporates major enhancements that are set to transform the landscape of content QC and will dramatically enhance the throughput of handling large volumes of content, helping our customers to efficiently manage workflows."

Sehun Yang, president and CEO at Namsung Traders Co. Ltd., South Korea said: "Since adding Interra Systems' BATON platform to our portfolio, it has proven to be a popular solution that many of our customers rely on to meet their QC requirements. We can't wait to provide them with all the new enhancements and capabilities the latest version has to offer. With its faster performance — especially for UHD — new and improved audio and video quality checks, support for the latest formats, and a faster and sleeker media player, BATON 9.0 will take our customers' media QC to the next level."

With BATON 9.0, the platform has received a complete platform stack upgrade. A migration from Python 2.x to Python 3.x results in a more responsive interface, increased scalability, and service and resource optimization, while a new Postgres DB and Django web framework simplifies database management, Interra said. BATON 9.0 also offers performance enhancements for QC and analysis of UHD content, optimized IMF analysis, and optimized reading and downloads from S3 cloud.

In addition, enhanced video quality checks in BATON 9.0 enable the detection and decoding of QR codes, video dropout, black bar, logo detection, burnt-in-text recognition, and more. The enhanced platform offers complete support and checks for the Dolby Atmos ecosystem—including Atmos storage formats, native Dolby Atmos, and cloud support for Atmos formats—and subtitles and transport stream formats. BATON 9.0 also features enhancements in audio quality checks, like Audio Silence, and improved support for formats including REDCODE audio, DPX, and TIFF.

The upgraded BATON Media Player, which allows media professionals to play, inspect, and verify audio and video content, now enables optimized playback of 4K content and further support for Dolby Atmos storage formats like AXS-R7, REDCODE audio, ".dng", and more options to review errors.

Interra Systems will be in Stand 7.C09 at the RAI Amsterdam. To register for IBC, visit https://show.ibc.org/.

Most broadcasters and content creators got their first taste of the potential of artificial intelligence from closed captioning (aka subtitling). Speech-to-text technology enabled by AI—something many of us already use in our daily lives—has been in use for more than a decade and improvements in its capabilities have become more evident, with far more accuracy in both transcribing as well as translating.

For broadcasters who have to comply with rigid FCC standards, however, the rules are explicit in terms of what type of content is covered as well as its accuracy and even placement on the screen. Vendors have responded to broadcasters’ needs with new tech that make the process more accurate and automated than ever. 

Voice Interaction
Voice Interaction, which began as a live captioning service in 2001 was among the first companies to incorporate AI-based closed captioning when it launched in 2008. Its services and products include automatic live closed captioning, speech transcription, spoken term detection and indexing, spoken language identification and speech analytics for actionable knowledge, compliance logging and broadcast monitoring.

The Portugal-based company has steadily increased its presence in North America, with Scripps and Nexstar among its U.S. customers, and Bell Canada, most of whom use its Audimus.Media platform, a broadcast-grade, AI-driven solution for real-time, automatic closed captioning across multiple platforms, including live TV broadcasting (OTT/OTA), streaming and online meetings. Its speech recognition capabilities extend to 40 languages, with simultaneous translation and speaker differentiation.

Renato Cassaca, chief software development engineer, says the company takes pride in its ability to quickly resolve issues that could result in mispronounced names or inaccurate information on the screen. 

“We have webcrawlers running 24 hours a day that get all the newspapers available online,” he said. “And we also get guest access to the newsroom computer system like AP’s ENPS or Avid iNnews—we have a permanent connection to those systems inside the TV stations and we collect all that data to improve their language models and every day they receive a retrained language model to cope with the changing reality.”

ENCO Systems
ENCO Systems has been a mainstay in the closed-caption market for years with its enCaption automated captioning platform, which it launched in 2010. Since then, AI has advanced far beyond its initial capabilities, and the company has focused on these advances. 

“We’ve been leveraging AI and machine learning for years to get better accuracy and quality out of speech to text,” said Ken Frommert, ENCO CEO for the Detroit-based company. 

“Our ASR [automated speech recognition] engine is actually better in certain situations than a human for live captioning or transcription. As AI has gotten better, it has allowed allowed broadcasters to offer live captioning at significantly less expense, which allows for more programming to be captioned, to not only meet FCC and other regulations  but also being able to leverage captions to search file-based transcriptions.”

(Read more: Captioning for Sports Broadcasting and Venues)

At the NAB Show, ENCO rolled out enCaption5, a cloud-native, microservices-based solution, which adds new features and flexibility such as a caption editor to view and refine the results of offline or previous live transcriptions. enCaption 5 can now add captions to both live and pre-recorded content in 48 languages, combining machine learning with advanced speech-to-text conversion and grammatical structure analysis to deliver exceptional accuracy with extremely low latency. enCaption also now incorporates ENCO’s enTranslate systems as a plug-in.

It also launched AITrack and ENCO-GPT, which leverages the ChatGPT model to generate language responses from text-based queries added to automated TV and radio production workflows. Initially targeting radio, AITrack integrates with ENCO’s DAD radio automation system to generate and insert voice tracks between songs. ENCO-GPT simplifies copy creation within TV and radio broadcasts and program streams and can  automatically create ad copy on behalf of sponsors.

AI-Media
Although the “AI” in Australian based Ai-Media actually stands for “accessibility innovation,” AI/ML is the current driving force behind the 20-year old company’s products and services. 

Much of the company’s first two decades was focused on providing live captioning services but in 2021, the company acquired long-time partner EEG to begin offering EEG’s LEXI automated captioning platform to its customers as well as to help bolster its presence in the North American market.  

It recently launched LEXI 3.0, an improved version of its flagship automatic captioning solution. Independent audits confirm LEXI 3.0 consistently delivers results with 35% fewer recognition, formatting and punctuation errors than the previous version, the company said. The latest version introduces new automated features, including speaker identification and AI-powered caption placement to avoid on-screen interference. The release boosts average quality results from 98.2% to 98.7% Number, Edition Error and Recognition Error (NER).

Combining both an automated AI-based captioning system like Lexi, along with continuing its live captioning service to customers worldwide helps set the company apart, according to John Peck, vice president of international sales.

 “We’re the only captioning supplier where we have all the background of actually producing captioning, whether it be humans and all the different quality levels and the accessibility to make sure that the end user’s needs are met,” he said. “We’re able to be that one vendor that can go from the technology platform all the way through to the service as well.” 

Interra Systems
Interra Systems’ BATON Captions is an automated solution that provides an end-to-end platform from caption generation to QC, auto corrections, review, regeneration and editing. The system is based on machine learning and automatic speech recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), which the company says can dramatically expedite the caption creation, QC and verification processes for both live and VOD content, while ensuring a high quality.

Ashish Basu, executive vice president, worldwide sales & business, emphasizes the need for QC in an environment where AI—particularly the buzz around ChatGPT—is hyped as the panacea for captioning accuracy. This attitude can run headlong into regulatory requirements, he added. 

“While AI can generate closed captions with accuracy in the high 90% under ideal circumstances, the reality of television is that circumstances are not always ideal,” Basu recently wrote on tvtechnology.com. “Background noise and heavy accents can quickly degrade the accuracy of AI-generated closed captions. Content owners, however, have no latitude with regulators. They simply cannot blame AI for missing the regulatory mark.

“This is where the hype over ChatGPT and other generative AI solutions runs headlong into the reality of generating closed captions and subtitles,” he cautioned. “If closed captions do not meet regulatory requirements, content owners will be out of compliance and are potentially exposed to devastating business consequences.  

“Not only will the money spent to generate sub-par closed captions have been wasted and more money spent to bring them up to snuff, but also the solid business relationships those content owners are trying to establish with local partners around the world will be threatened,” Basu concluded. 

So while advances in AI are helping make closed captioning more accurate and accessible, we’re still in the early stages. As more broadcasters deploy AI, they will need to balance the need for speed and accuracy with the need to maintain compliance. 

MUMBAI, India—As one of the largest players in the global content localization space, with offices worldwide, ZOO Digital is a technology provider for premium content brands. ZOO Digital’s localization services adapt original content for different languages, regions and cultures, and its media services ensure that content is technically compliant for all required streaming service platforms. With our services and global capabilities, content creators can extend the reach and financial opportunities for both new and existing entertainment content.

In 2017, when we were then known as Vista India Digital Media, we explored various automated AV quality checking tools in the market for our automated QC workflows—focusing in particular on their capability, scalability and speed.

Automated QC Support
The deciding factor in choosing Interra Systems’ BATON solution was based on three key aspects: BATON’s fit with our specific QC needs, its speed performance, and Interra Systems’ responsiveness and support. These aspects are paramount, as automated QC is the first in a long line of processes that ensures content qualifies for downstream flow—with QC being repeated once again at the finalizing stage. 

We also liked the responsiveness and support of the Interra Systems team who guided us through the trials we conducted ahead of full deployment, quicking answering all of our questions as well as providing flexible licensing options. This gave us a sense of the level of support we could expect from them, and I’m happy to say that they have been consistent.

We have deployed BATON for the QC of all of our mezzanine files for any video and audio anomalies such as drop frames, tics and pops, black frames, and more. These files are usually delivered to a variety of premium OTT platforms.

Speed & Quality
These partner platforms have highly stringent quality standards coupled with a need for fast turnaround delivery schedules. Any gaps in content files detected downstream will lead to the reacquisition of content and wasted resources and will also impact the delivery timeline. BATON has helped secure our QC workflow manifolds by saving time, effort, and identifying anomalies like frame corruption, digital hits, and more, which can easily be missed during “eyeball only” QC.

The AV material we QC with BATON ranges from HD, to UHD, to HDR10. With the volume of work we handle, we typically perform quality checks 24/7. We put BATON through its paces on a daily basis and I’m happy to say that we haven’t experienced any breakdowns since we started using it. BATON has stayed ahead of the curve with the ever-changing quality requirements of various content platforms with frequent upgrades, and shows Interra Systems’ commitment to deliver best in class solutions. 

Sathya Narayanan is CTO at Zoo India / Vista India Digital Media and has more than 25 years of experience in the media and technology space, covering a range of industries including film, animation, gaming, and media technology solutions. Narayanan’s passion is to architect technology solutions related to the M&E market, leveraging years of domain expertise in the media industry. He can be reached at
sathya.narayanan@vistaindia.com.

For more information, visit www.interrasystems.com.

At IBC2018, Interra Systems will spotlight its Baton ABR and Orion-OTT solutions for delivering high-quality streamed video. Baton ABR and Orion-OTT perform quality control and monitoring for VOD content from ingest to NOC and other distribution points. The company says visitors will be able to see how Baton ABR’s checks at pre- and post-transcode stages, along with Orion-OTT's delivery-specific checks and features, assure QoE for every stream on every device. For live-event streaming, Orion-OTT offers a platform that can monitor a large number of streams for adaptive bitrate compliance along with audio-video quality checks in real time. The solution suite also supports closed captions, ad verification/compliance and DRMs.

Interra Systems’ OTT solutions can be deployed in the cloud or on premises, providing enhanced efficiency and flexibility for any workflow. When complemented by the company’s Orion system for real-time monitoring of IP-based infrastructures, Baton ABR and Orion-OTT provide broadcasters with a total solution for streaming superior-quality services. Orion looks at all aspects of video streams, such as QoS, QoE, closed captions, ad-insertion verification, reporting, and troubleshooting.

Interra Systems also will introduce Winnow, a machine-learning-driven add-on for its Baton QC solution. Enabled by artificial intelligence, Winnow offers broadcasters a compliance solution powered by machine-learning and computer vision technologies. The company says that integrated with Baton, this enhancement can be deployed in both cloud and on-premises environments. Relying on user-defined rule sets, Winnow checks compliance and identification of content against regulations in different countries, regions and organizations.

Baton also includes support for the VAST protocol, hybrid QC workflows, as well as enhanced support for HDR content and audio language-detection capabilities.

Demonstrations will be held in the Interra Systems’ Stand 7.C09. The IBC2018 show is Sept. 13–18, in Amsterdam. For more information or to register, visit www.ibc.org.

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