For much of its history, the multiviewer has served a straightforward purpose: Provide a quick visual check that channels were present and behaving. Operators watched feeds, listened to audio, and scanned captions for obvious issues. That approach worked when facilities monitored a relatively small group of linear channels.

Today’s environment is more demanding. Operations span linear broadcast, OTT, FAST, and pop-up services, often supported by teams that haven’t grown at the same pace. Add hybrid SDI/IP infrastructures and issues that don’t show up visually, and the limitations of traditional monitoring become clear. In response, the multiviewer has had to grow into a far more capable operational tool.

The Classic Multiviewer: What It Solved — and What It Missed
Legacy multiviewers excelled at confidence monitoring. They confirmed feed presence, audio activity, and the basic health of captions and formats. Their shortcomings became more visible as operations expanded.

Many were hardware-bound, difficult to scale, and reliant on constant human attention. Operators could easily miss issues that weren’t visually obvious, such as loudness violations, subtle compression problems, caption sync drift, or packet-level instability in IP streams. These systems also sat apart from deeper monitoring tools, forcing operators to jump between systems to determine the cause of an issue.

As more services came online and distribution moved across multiple platforms, that model stopped being sustainable. The traditional multiviewer simply couldn’t keep pace with the volume and complexity of signals in play.

Why Operations Teams Are Feeling New Pressure
Operations teams today face a convergence of added responsibilities and tighter resources. Channels have multiplied across linear, OTT, and FAST workflows, yet staffing often remains flat. Many teams now work across facilities, regions, and time zones, making coordination more complex and increasing reliance on automation.

Hybrid SDI/IP environments add challenges of their own. Timing drift, jitter, packet loss, and hardware instability can degrade service even when the video looks fine. Operators don’t just need to see that something is wrong on a multiviewer; they need insight into what’s driving those issues across the chain.

The Evolution of the Multiviewer: From Passive Display to Integrated Intelligence
The expanding scope of modern operations forced the multiviewer to evolve. Alarms and basic QC overlays were early additions, but they didn’t go far enough. Teams needed a clearer understanding of what was happening behind the picture.

Modern multiviewers now incorporate QoE and QoS metrics, loudness levels, caption behavior, SCTE-35 markers, transport stream data, network timing, and encoder/decoder health. Seeing these signals alongside video transforms the multiviewer from a passive display to an intelligence tool.

That change shows up in everyday workflows. Compression artifacts that appear intermittently, caption drift that worsens over time, or missing SCTE markers that disrupt ad delivery are often overlooked during visual monitoring alone. When these conditions are visible in the same place as the video, operators spot patterns sooner and can move more quickly toward root-cause analysis.

Enhancing Situational Awareness for Lean, Distributed Teams
Teams overseeing growing volumes of content need tools that help them focus on what matters. Modern multiviewers use metadata stacks, color cues, and KPIs to help operators evaluate issues at a glance. These cues highlight whether a problem affects the viewer and offer clues about its origin without requiring multiple toolsets.

The way alerts are handled is just as important. When thresholds and priorities are tuned correctly, automated alerts elevate meaningful events and help operators avoid distraction from less critical noise. Automation doesn’t override human judgment; instead, it supports exception-based monitoring, which has become essential for teams working across different locations. Shared dashboards also give operations, engineering, and IT a unified view of system health and service performance.

Multiviewers in IP Architectures — and the Arrival of Intelligence Platforms
As more facilities move toward IP-driven workflows, the link between network behavior and video quality becomes impossible to ignore. Packet loss, jitter, buffer instability, congestion, and PTP timing drift can disrupt service even when the picture appears stable on screen.

A modern multiviewer needs to surface transport—and network-level insight directly alongside video feeds so operators can interpret issues more accurately. This combined visibility helps close the long-standing gap between traditional engineering and IT/network teams.

At the same time, software-based, scalable multiviewers are replacing fixed hardware systems, giving teams the flexibility to run monitoring on standard servers or in the cloud. This makes it easier to expand monitoring capacity as workloads increase or change.

More advanced analysis capabilities are following the same path. Pattern recognition and intelligent correlation can help highlight trends or emerging failures before viewers notice anything is wrong. To support modern operations, next-generation multiviewers should unify monitoring and visualization, provide real-time actionable insight from anywhere, and correlate issues across the entire workflow. The aim is simple: help teams identify problems sooner, resolve them efficiently, and maintain high-quality service without adding operational burden.

As channel counts rise and workflows become more distributed and IP-driven, teams need tools that reveal insight rather than simply presenting imagery. For many organizations, the multiviewer is increasingly becoming that central surface — a place where video, metadata, network signals, and diagnostic context come together. For teams evaluating new platforms, the focus should be on flexibility, integrated intelligence, and the ability to support lean, distributed operations with confidence.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.—Signal processing product provider Cobalt Digital has announced a 2026 NAB Show 2026 lineup that features numerous additions to its end-to-end IPMX and ST 2110 ecosystem, including new standalone processors, IPMX-native audio monitoring, multiviewers, gateways, and mini converters.

During the show, the company will be debuting COBALT blueCORE, a family of 1RU fully featured standalone signal processors, with more details to be announced closer the show.

In addition, the company will present the COBALT PACIFIC compression line with an ST 2110/IPMX output option for the COBALT PACIFIC ULL-DEC upgradeable software defined broadcast decoder.

The enhancement allows decoded content to be available simultaneously over SDI and over ST 2110/IPMX. For ST 2110 operation, a built-in frame sync will emit a PTP-locked signal. Cobalt is also introducing a DVB-S/S2 factory-installed demodulator option that allows decoding and pass-through of satellite signals, on ASI and over IP.

Additionally, as FCC regulations require the remainder of C-Band spectrum to be auctioned, Cobalt has responded by adding support for hybrid Satellite-Internet operation to the COBALT PACIFIC compression line, compliant with VSR TR-06-4 Part 7. In this mode, satellite is used for bulk distribution, and the Internet is used to recover any lost packets, allowing the use of Ku and Ka bands for distribution.

Cobalt, a founding partner in the openGear initiative, will also be introducing fixed-function openGear cards designed as cost-effective entry points with license-based expansion for scalability as workflows evolve.

The new 9925-FSx Frame Sync openGear card is an entry level one path frame sync card that supports license upgrades up to four paths per card, and an audio processing license upgrade for AES, MADI, and DANTE 64 support.

The new 9981-LUTx Color Processor openGear® card is an entry level color processing card that supports license upgrades up to four paths per card along with options including: SCALER, BBC LUT, COLOR, 4K, LOGO and ANC.

Cobalt will also be highlighting its portfolio of products that support end-to-end IPMX and ST 2110 workflows. The company described these as follows:

• The COBALT ARIA AUD-MON is the only fully IPMX-compliant audio monitor on the market. Built for any environment migrating toward IP-based operations, AUD-MON features best-in-class sound monitoring and 16 SDI or 64 MADI metering from a compact rack-mount form-factor. Sound is produced by an efficient Class-D amplifier with DSP and specially selected speaker components. The easy-to-use and customizable touch display front panel is designed for simple and intuitive operation with eight individual volume controls for mixing. Control can also be achieved through a web interface.
• Cobalt will also highlight the 9935-AUD4-DANTE, a quad-channel with up to 12G DANTE/AES/MADI/embed and de-embed functions with frame sync capabilities. The card features two gigabit Ethernet ports, a 64x64 configuration, and a full audio router mixer.
• The COBALT UltraBlue MV-SW multiviewers are available as both a turnkey solution with four HDMI heads, or as a software package that runs on customer-supplied dedicated hardware. COBALT® UltraBlue can receive compressed and baseband audio/video content over IP across a variety of protocols and formats with very flexible audio routing, bringing a multitude of options to suit every application, and now feature IPMX support for transitioning to either ST 2110 or IPMX workflows. The multiviewer also supports SDI inputs and outputs.
• Multiple models in the COBALT SAPPHIRE mini converter family of IPMX-capable standalone mini-converters will also be featured. Available in a variety of configurations including single, dual, and quad channel, with some models capable of simultaneously transmitting and receiving, these SAPPHIRE units convert between IPMX compatible (and SMPTE ST 2110 compatible) signals and SDI/HDMI, with support for baseband video and JPEG-XS.
• The COBALT® INDIGO gateway solutions provide a powerful on and off ramp between IP and SDI with support for IPMX as well as ST 2110. These versatile, high-performance solutions bridge the gap between traditional SDI workflows and modern IP-based infrastructures by simplifying interop, routing, and format translations while preserving image quality and latency performance—critical for transitioning to IP.

For further information visit: www.cobaltdigital.com.

LAS VEGAS—At Creative Technology, we deliver mission-critical monitoring and multi­viewing solutions for some of the world’s largest live events, from international product launches and corporate meetings to major tech conferences. Our workflows span on-premises compressed and uncompressed IP, OTT and remote production over public internet.

To keep pace with the speed and diversity of these productions, we needed a software platform that was flexible, scalable and capable of delivering high-quality, low-latency multiviewers for every team—on site or remote.

Today, the TAG Realtime Monitoring Platform from TAG Video Systems provides the scalable probing, monitoring and multiviewing backbone for our operators, engineers and directors. It’s helping us to reduce friction, accelerate deployment and gain complete confidence in every signal we manage.

TAG’s zero-friction model gives us the flexibility to scale in any direction, from a single server with dozens of sources to multiple servers handling smaller, dedicated workloads.

The Deployment
We initially deployed TAG to support our remote and virtual operations in the U.S. Since then, we’ve supported productions across Europe, Asia and South America. As the needs of each production can vary significantly, we were able to spin up and down environments without the overhead and limitations of fixed hardware—replacing traditional multiviewers with TAG’s IP-native software platform.

That flexibility made TAG an ideal fit across our use cases: Large-scale corporate, sports and entertainment events; complex workflows with tally, UMD control and data integration; and hybrid setups involving multiple networks and locations.

TAG’s orchestration layer allowed us to scale up quickly. Our network operations center (NOC) team handles layout adjustments and signal routing centrally, while field operators and directors get real-time, tailored views. Whether we’re running TAG on bare metal or in the cloud, the consistency and quality of experience are the same.

We use TAG everywhere we can—on prem or cloud, compressed or uncompressed, we just stand it up and go. It’s that flexible.

What stood out most during implementation was TAG’s simplicity and speed. We had new instances running in minutes—not days—and configuration was intuitive enough that multiple engineers across locations could operate in parallel.

We rely on TAG’s orchestration tools to manage layouts, swap sources, and deliver exact multiviews to various users without duplicate effort. Operators receive only what they need, and directors are seeing camera shading, tally indicators, and graphics timing in real time.

Our team also appreciates the operational independence TAG provides. We’re able to make multiview changes on the fly without touching routers or interrupting the production flow. “It’s not just the layout flexibility,” Sarah Wright, project engineer at Creative Technology said. “It’s the user interface, the orchestration. It’s brilliant.”

Operational Benefits
TAG has become a key part of our live production strategy. We can deploy, configure and reconfigure in minutes—giving us the ability to handle last-minute changes and multiple show formats.

Probing and multiviewing across video, audio and metadata lets us spot issues immediately and take corrective action. Layouts, tallies and source changes are handled remotely by our NOC, giving field teams what they need with zero disruption.

We can also scale up and down as required without having to worry about moving licenses around.

TAG also lets each department—engineering, operations and technical directors­—get the view they need, how they need it. This makes us more efficient, responsive and more confident. TAG just works.

We enjoy working with the team at TAG and look forward to continuing our partnership. We’re exploring even deeper integrations with our telemetry and orchestration layers. We also see the potential to add advanced features like smart recording and content matching as our workflows evolve.

At Creative Technology, we’re committed to engineering the best solutions for our clients. TAG helps us do that—with less effort, more flexibility, and total confidence in our signal chain.

More information is available at https://tagvs.com/monitoring/.

Monitoring audio and video content in today’s increasingly complex media environment requires more flexibility than ever. Fortunately, broadcasters’ adoption of IP and the cloud have brought that flexibility to a more reasonable integration level and price point.

As production environments evolve, the role of multiviewers continues to expand, according to Ketan Patel, product manager, multiviewer systems for Evertz. “Today’s multiviewers must handle a wide variety of signal types—compressed and uncompressed, IP and SDI—and operate seamlessly across both on-prem and cloud infrastructures,” he says.

With more operations adopting the SMPTE 2110 IP protocol, demand is increasing, Patel added. “Evertz has deployed over 600 SMPTE ST 2110 systems globally, many of which feature our high-density ev670-X30-HW-V2 modular platform and the ultra-high-density PREFEX multiviewer system.”

Michael Demb, vice president of product strategy for TAG, agreed that having flexibility across both cloud and on-prem is paramount in today’s multiviewer platforms.

“Multiviewers are evolving from passive displays into active operational hubs, central to how media teams manage software-defined workflows today,” he said. “As infrastructures decentralize and scale dynamically across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments, multiviewers like TAG’s are becoming the front line for real-time insight, signal integrity validation, and workflow control.”

Saving Money
Budgetary pressures are also driving broadcasters’ demands, and whether they’re deployed in a full-cloud scenario or hybrid on-prem, multiviewers are becoming more versatile, according to John Mailhot, senior vice president, product management, at Imagine Communications.

“Operational and cost efficiencies are top of mind in today’s dynamic production operations,” he said. “Whether signal processing is done in the cloud or on-prem, the multiviewer plays a critical role in enabling operations teams to make fast, informed, content-critical decisions.

“A robust multiviewer system allows operators to quickly identify and resolve issues in real time—ultimately enabling the team to manage more signals across more productions,” Mailhot added. “As a result, multiviewers will continue evolving from passive display systems to active enablers of efficient, scalable media operations.”

Erling Hedkvist, sales and business development for manifold, said his company’s platform can provide the best of both cloud and on-prem worlds.

“One of our big differentiators is that our customers get the flexibility of software and virtualization but with the performance of dedicated hardware that the live production industry demands,” he said. “This gives them subframe latency and uncompressed, high-quality processing but also a service-based architecture where they can spin services up and down on-demand and that is self-healing in case of an underlying hardware issue.”

Hedkvist touts the “secret sauce” of manifold’s cloud-based live production system: “The underlying design of manifold CLOUD is built around a shared memory architecture,” he said. “Media is first written into memory, allowing multiple services [such as multiviewers, format converters, color correctors and codecs] to access and process that data directly rather than relying on traditional signal paths. This architecture decouples processing from format and frame rate, as services work on pixel data in memory.”

Lower Latency
Monitoring live production often requires making split-second decisions, something that remains top of mind when dealing with latency. Suzana Brady, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Cobalt Digital, said that even though the company’s UltraBlue SW-MV multiviewer is implemented in software on a PC platform, “it was designed with latency in mind.”

“For baseband inputs, the latency is around three frames to a screen, and less than that for a streaming output,” she said. “Scalability is provided by the PC platform, from lower-cost units for simple multiviewers to large platforms for units with lots of inputs and heads. There is a full-featured modern API to ease integration in complex workflows.”

The importance of integrating software-based multiviewing into live production platforms has been demonstrated through the flexibility offered by the cloud and IP, according to Evertz’ Patel.

“All [Evertz] platforms are designed to be part of a unified system, enabling operators to build highly dense, format-agnostic monitoring solutions across 3G, UHD, compressed and uncompressed feeds,” Patel said. “Whether it’s for native IP, hybrid or SDI workflows, users can scale according to their operational requirements without compromising quality or latency.”

When it comes to the variety of high-resolution formats, including HDR, vendors have adopted a format-agnostic approach and upped their processing power.

Chris Scheck, head of marketing content for Lawo, says the efficiency of the company’s HOME Multiviewer—available as a standalone solution and as part of Lawo’s HOME Apps ecosystem—is architected to consume less power, making monitoring more efficient.

“In combination with a .edge Hyper-Density SDI/IP Gateway and Processing unit, which can simultaneously receive and output SDI signals and generate smaller-resolution versions of video input signals, the HOME Multi­viewer can be used in a so-called intelligent workflow that uses no more than the absolutely required amount of network bandwidth for each PiP [picture in picture], based on its size, thus ensuring that the input bandwidth never exceeds the output bandwidth,” Sheck said, adding that such proxies are important when operating in a bandwidth-
restricted environment.

“UHD streams, for instance, comprise a lot more data than is needed for a small PiP; not having to downscale such PiP footage therefore means that fewer CPU cores are needed to process the information,” he said. “The allocation of the relevant proxy to each PiP/tile is handled automatically while the multiviewer head is being configured with the intuitive theWALL app.”

New Features
While multiviewing continues to evolve, vendors are continually adding new features that take advantage of the flexibility offered by IP and the cloud.

At IBC this month, Mediaproxy is introducing Instant Replay for live incident review along with the ability to monitor HTML content directly within mosaic outputs. Designed to streamline the process of incident investigation, Instant Replay allows broadcast operators and engineers to instantly review incidents that occur during live broadcasts.

“Being able to have high-quality instant replay within our ecosystem of monitoring tools will significantly reduce the time it takes to investigate and clear on-air incidents,” says Erik Otto, Mediaproxy CEO. “The addition of HTML data panels in both our interactive server-side multiviewers further underline our commitment to solving real-world problems for customers today.”

Lawo is taking its HOME Video Monitor app out of the facility and making it more accessible to operators, according to Scheck.

“With its HOME Video Monitor app, Lawo is about to launch a solution that allows users to monitor video feeds on their laptops and mobile devices, which is extremely useful for busy operators who quickly need to check something on their way to a different location,” he says. “While this may not be a replacement for a full-blown multiviewer, it may be practical for certain workflows.”

What About AI?
Vendors are taking the same cautious approach towards implementing artificial intelligence into their multiviewing platforms as their customers are.

TAG is actively exploring the potential of adding AI as part of its long-term innovation road map. “We’re engaged in early-stage development to evaluate how technologies like Multimodal AI and agentic AI could support operational efficiency, simplify workflows, and enhance the monitoring experience,” Demb said, adding that “any future capabilities will be designed to augment—not replace—human decision-making, and to serve the real-world needs of our customers.”

There are no immediate plans for manifold to integrate AI into its multi­viewer line, the company says. In fact, “we recently signed a significant contract with a major U.K. broadcaster that explicitly prohibits the inclusion of AI in the deliverables,” Hedkvist says. “[This is] a clear sign that there’s still hesitation among Tier-1 customers when it comes to unsupervised AI in live production workflows.”

Scheck concurs that the jury is still out when it comes to adopting AI.

“Lawo’s HOME Multiviewer comes equipped with a flexible logic system for alarm and tally functions to allow users to catch errors in a timely fashion and remain in control,” he says. “Whether AI could play a part in this is certainly worth investigating, even though a deterministic approach based on algorithms and real-world experience may be hard to beat for some time to come.”

Scheck adds that some operators are taking multiviewing to another level.

“One of our customers now operates OB trucks that are no longer equipped with multiviewer walls; the screens have been replaced by Apple Vision Pro headsets,” he says. “From what we have heard, getting used to them was rather straightforward, and operators in those trucks like the thrill of working with flexible cutting-edge tools and increasingly consider multiviewer walls as somewhat ‘old-school.’ ”

Nevertheless, all the bells and whistles being added to multiviewers don’t take away the essential role of the technology, according to Cobalt’s Brady.

“We don’t see the fundamental role of multiviewers changing in live broadcast, their purpose has remained consistent since the early days of television,” she says. “What is changing is the scale, quality, and accessibility of multiviewing in modern, software-defined infrastructures.”

SALT LAKE CITY and BEAVERTON, Ore.—Utah Scientific and Apantac have announced a new combined warranty policy and the companies will highlight their technology partnership at the 2024 NAB Show, April 13-17, in Las Vegas. 

Effective immediately, Apantac customers will benefit from an extended five-year warranty when purchasing a multiviewer with a Utah Scientific routing switcher, the companies said.

Apantac and Utah Scientific have worked closely together for several years, and this collaboration brings together the former’s expertise in video processing and multiviewer solutions with the latter’s proficiency in routing switchers and related broadcast infrastructure, they said.

Apantac has integrated Utah Scientific protocols into its multiviewers, which allows them to communicate and interact effectively with Utah Scientific routing switchers. Under-monitor display (UMD) protocols make it possible to display source name information alongside video feeds on the multiviewers' UMDs. The integration enhances operational efficiency and simplifies monitoring and control processes in broadcast and production environments, they said.

Utah Scientific seamlessly incorporates Apantac's multiviewer software into its hardware panels, allowing engineers to build and retain custom viewing presets accessible at the touch of a button. Because of the seamless integration, joint customers get enhanced functionality, more options in their broadcast workflows and more choices for building a scalable visual monitoring system, they said.

Apantac will demonstrate its T# mixed-format, modular multiviewers integrated with Utah Scientific routers in its NAB Show booth. Utah Scientific will showcase the technology integration between its UTAH-400 Series 2 UHD router and the Apantac multiviewer in its booth.

See Apantac at NAB Show booth SU7014.

See Utah Scientific at NAB Show booth SU1027.

More information is available on the Apantac and Utah Scientific websites.

MONTREAL—During IBC2023, Grass Valley will be demonstrating how the company’s critical signal processing, conversion,  and network management solutions enable customers to work more efficiently while also migrating their workflows to the integrated SDI/IP infrastructure of Grass Valley’s Agile Media  Processing Platform (AMPP). 

The company said that the demos show the flexibility of its solutions, which let customers use any combination of on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid approaches. Media enterprises can  select the architecture that best serves their needs today, and that seamlessly adapts to  accommodate their changing needs. 

Among the recent infrastructure additions is an integrated tally management option for GV  Orbit, the Grass Valley IP and SDI configuration, control, and monitoring solution.

This allows users to include tally management capabilities on the same server that controls all signal paths, and that provides configuration and monitoring in a single integrated view. Adding Tally Management to a server a client is already using saves rack space, cabling, power, and installation labor. 

“We’ve partnered with TSL to add GVO-Tally as an option within GV Orbit,” says Steve Bilow,  senior product manager, infrastructure software platforms for Grass Valley. “You don’t need  extra power, rack space, cabling, or installation labor to get a complete tally system that facilitates communication between Grass Valley Production Switchers, Camera tally lamps, and  the labels and properties on UMDs and multiviewer tiles.” 

GV Orbit also features many tools that simplify its use, the company reported. 

For example, it can discover all  connected Grass Valley and NMOS-compliant network devices and will display them  automatically in any of several available views. Rather than having to manually connect each device within a network topology, simply drag the sources you need to the main topology  display and “auto-provision” them. GV Orbit automatically connects all the links between your  IP switches, gateways, and IP devices, while still permitting manual configuration as needed. 

Grass Valley also reported that its drive for greater efficiency and simplicity is apparent in the latest introductions to the Kaleido multiviewer family. 

Kaleido-IP (KIP) already offers the largest number of simultaneous video and audio program decodes in the industry. That tradition of leadership  continues with the new top-of-the-line KIP-X240 1RU platform supporting up to 400G of IP  bandwidth. This breakthrough allows the KIP-X240 to monitor, probe and display up 100  uncompressed inputs with full 2022-7 redundancy, the company said. 

“Kaleido-IP already excelled in compressed workflows. With the KIP-X240 we now offer a  software-based solution that rivals the uncompressed performance of proprietary hardware offerings while maintaining the flexibility to support uncompressed or compressed applications on a single platform,” says Lee Buchanan, vice president of cameras and networking for Grass Valley. “The  KIP-X240 achieves this leap in performance while continuing to support the rich feature set the  industry has come to know. These include best-in-class signal probing and alarming, simple and  flexible layout creation and the Kaleido innovation of `any source, anywhere’ which allows nearly limitless replication and scaling of input sources.”

During IBC2023 at the Grass Valley stand, customers will also see the new MV-1200 Series Standalone and  Modular Multiviewers. 

The MV-1200 Series Multiviewers provide high-density and cost effective options for SDI multiviewing up to 12G. Standalone models include 16 or 32 inputs  with 4 output heads over SDI and/or HDMI in a 1RU form factor. Also available is a 3RU  Modular frame expandable up to 144 12G-SDI inputs with up to 16 output heads. 

There are also upgrades in the KudosPro converter line with the addition of ST 2110 IP  capability in the new ULC2000 and UMC1000 UHD framerate converters. 

Finally, Grass Valley also announced a significant investment in next-generation hardware  processing technology – part of a sustained focus on providing high-quality SDI- and IP-based  infrastructure products. The investment adds 25 additional R&D resources to accelerate  advancements in Densité modular processing, while enabling the continuing development of  advanced hardware products. 

With over 40,000 frames shipped to date, the Densité modular system comprises a wide range  of frames and cards, including the XIP Agile Processing Platform. The XIP hosts software-defined  applications, including JPEG-XS encode/decode, ASI/IP gateway and up/down/cross conversion for SDI/IP workflows. Grass Valley’s IBC demonstrations will include a 5th generation ST 2110  IP/SDI gateway application running on the XIP Platform. 

To see how Grass Valley’s latest network orchestration, multiviewer, routing and signal  conversion products are driving the transition to ST 2110 while maintaining full integration with  SDI, visit stand 9-A01 at IBC 2023 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre between  September 15th and 18th.

More information is available at grassvalley.com.  

BURBANK, Calif.—G&D North America will unveil its PersonalWorkplace-Controller, a flexible multiviewing tool that displays multiple video signal on a single large monitor or multiple displays, and highlight its KVM expertise at the 2023 NAB Show, April 15-19, in Las Vegas.

The PersonalWorkplace-Controller enables latency-free operation of multiple computers from a single console to facilitate everyday work and allows users to arrange video sources as needed, the company said.

The company also will roll out a version of its VisionXS matrix-compatible extender for resolutions up to 2500x1600 60Hz. The extender incorporates the company’s lossless bluedec compression, it said.

It also will introduce a version of the VisionXS extender with two display port connectors for dual-head applications, which makes it possible to operate two monitors at the same time while saving on cabling and additional hardware, it said.

The company’s VisionXS-IP portfolio is getting bigger with the addition of new versions offering Power-over-Ethernet support.

All new products are compatible with existing models.

See G&D North America at NAB Show booth N1967.

More information is available on the company’s website.

DOHA, Qatar—TAG Video Systems is providing monitoring and visualization for Fox Sports as it covers the World Cup, Nov. 20-Dec. 18, the company said.

Fox Sports will present 64 World Cup matches live in the U.S. across Fox and FS1 with every match live streaming on the Fox Sports app and available for free on-demand as replays on Tubi.

The broadcaster selected TAG’s 100% IP software platform for all of its control rooms and operations multiviewers, monitoring the integrity of more than 1,200 sources driving more than 150 displays, TAG said.

The TAG monitoring and visualization platform is an integral part of a Fox Sports’ live-production system built in a different form factor. Built as two separate and redundant systems, Fox Sports’ joint event system is one of the largest transportable SMPTE ST 2110 live production flypacks in use. It can be quickly flown and setup between major events and allows Fox Sports to bypass intermodal transport by container ships.

“The key is the monitoring, being able to see everything coming in and going out and being able to QC it – that’s really the goal of the IBC as the central hub. It connects to the studio location; it connects to all the venues; it connects to our Los Angeles broadcast facility as well as our Tempe [Ariz.] broadcast facility,” said Kevin Callahan, vice president of field operations and engineering at Fox Sports.

The flypack system leverages IP and SMPTE ST 2110 technology, and relies on an all-fiber design that significantly reduces the size and weight of the kit. With a full control room, 40 tech core racks, and 10 venue racks, it travels fully pre-wired and was ready to go upon arrival in Doha. 

The 8-foot-tall tech core racks were built on top of shock-mounted airplane pallets. To fit in an airplane cargo hold, Callahan and Douglas McGee, consulting engineer for system design, came up with the idea of having custom racks that fold in half while fully wired to fit under the cargo hold height restrictions. 

The TAG multiviewer and monitoring platform enables Fox Sports operators to see everything in the ST-2110 IP workflow as well as JPEG-XS and UHD, which the broadcaster is using for transmission between the IBC and studio, venues and Fox Sports operations centers in Tempe and Los Angeles. In addition, a remote IT team will manage the entire network. As technology advances and new formats emerge, the system provides built-in room for growth to allow the broadcaster to keep pace with rapid changes in the industry, TAG said.

Using flypacks to transport live production systems may open doors to a whole new range of capabilities and reinvent how live production is done. The same systems can be transported from venue to venue, leading to an increase in familiarity and decrease in training time. Another advantage is the ability to add capabilities as workflows change, enhancing and improving the system, it said.

“Fox Sports tapped TAG for many reasons, not the least being our constantly evolving upgrades and improvements,” said TAG chief strategy officer Peter Wharton. “Since this system was built, we’ve launched numerous new features including our Bridge Technology that removes the complexity of routing the same stream to multiple locations with an ultra-efficient architecture. With a pure software solution on commodity hardware, TAG enables Fox to change and add to the system as their business needs evolve while saving capacity, resources and costs in the future, all without changing hardware.

“We worked seamlessly with Diversified, EVS and a number of other vendors to ensure that every one of Fox Sports’ financial and operational goals were met.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

For an area of broadcast operations that changed little over the course of TV technology history, the monitoring display has experienced a rapid pace of development in a relatively short time period. From a passive monitor based on, first, the cathode ray tube and then LED or similar technologies that was able to only show one image at a time, it is now the multiviewer, showing multiple images at once. Not only that, it is able to perform more functions than just displaying pictures.

This has made multiviewers an increasingly crucial element of master control rooms (MCRs) at broadcast and playout centers, providing tools for compliance logging and checking, among other things. On top of these, as Ryan Wallenberg, vice president of engineering for Cobalt Digital, observes, the growing trend is for these units to accommodate a multitude of signal formats simultaneously. “More multiviewers are going hybrid, allowing for a mix of SDI, uncompressed IP SMPTE ST 2022-6/2110 and compressed MPEG2, H.264, HEVC, J2K and JPEG-XS,” he says.

Mix and Match
The ability to mix and match formats also extends to image quality and resolution. Wallenberg adds that new viewing systems can accept both HDR and SDR, with the capacity to convert to a common format for mixing SDR, HLG, PQ and SLOG3 and then switch to the required monitor format. “There is still lots of demand for 3G signal monitoring but with UHD output for higher quality output vs. 1080p output resolutions,” he comments. “UHD for inputs is more common in Europe and China than in the U.S.”

Today, it is unlikely that people are able to buy a display that is not UHD, according to John Mailhot, CTO for networking products at Imagine Communications. “In a mobile there’s usually a requirement that they have to do UHD but it often involves a trade-off,” he says. “It could be having fewer replays if they are working in UHD. The vehicle will be set up differently for different events with varying workflows and probably not run everything in UHD.”

Something that Mailhot considers is becoming the minimum requirement—”table stakes” in his words—is 1080p but in HDR. “I think there’s going to be an interesting amount of broadcasters who produce that as their primary format and then turn it into 1080i or SDI or other things for distribution. UHD is four times the bandwidth but adding HDR to an existing workflow is a much easier lift and arguably more impactful. In the multiviewer world we’re really starting to see people asking about HDR more than they used to.”

Flexibility is Key
Ketan Patel, product manager of multiviewer solutions at Evertz, observes that customers are now looking for three main things in multiviewers: density, format flexibility and advanced features.

“Density of solution in terms of rack space and power are key for applications like OB trucks,” he says. “The number of inputs and outputs per RU is a metric everyone is trying to maximize. Unfortunately, we don’t have one format or standard across the broadcast chain, so flexibility is a big issue with all facilities.

“Ideally, people want to have a singular platform that can monitor the incoming contribution feeds, the production/in-facility signal flows and the distribution feeds,” Patel added. “Monitoring is then visually showing the video and audio bars, the health of the video, the audio and key items such as SCTE triggers.”

Because of this, Patel continues, multiviewers are no longer merely for visualizing video/audio/data sources as multi-images on displays; they’re real-time probes for those sources.

“The probes are also not just concerned with the video/audio/data but also the transport protocols and bandwidth,” he said. “This synergy has become more important as facilities have many more signals to monitor and not enough eyeballs to watch them all. 

“We developed the concept of monitoring by exception when customers found their operational staff were fatigued looking at hundreds of images for potential alarms,” he added. “With our ‘penalty box’ feature we can designate an area/display where only signals that have alarms appear so operators can focus on resolving those issues.”

Paul Briscoe, chief architect for TAG Video Systems, agrees that “monitoring hundreds or thousands of channels with human eyeballs is unreasonable,” which explains why probing, monitoring analysis, alarming and logging have become the norm.

“Visualization is still important,” he says, “and our Adaptive Monitoring allows any number of channels to be monitored but only those needing eyes on them in penalty boxes to be visualized.”

Move to IP and Cloud
A trend that Briscoe says TAG is also following is towards “pure software/IP-based monitoring platforms,” which will lead to the cloud. “That enables deployment in ground, cloud or hybrid scenarios on a global basis,” he explains. “Such a capability is almost infinitely scalable. Another important trend is integration with third-party systems, so we support open standards to enable orchestration and control interoperation with the widest array of other systems.”

At Lawo, Senior Product Manager of Media Infrastructure Stephan Türkay says the company is “absolutely moving to a cloud future,” with IP-based multiviewers being a prime candidate for that transition.

“Operational staff require multiviewers to be as low latency as possible,” he comments, “which can be tricky to achieve in an off-premise cloud deployment. We anticipate there to be an application-specific mix of deployments—on and off premise—as well as software and hardware technology to host the multiviewer function.”

Türkay adds that with the shift of traditional workflows for both production and playout to the cloud, there is the growing need to monitor signals as natively as possible. “Customers want to avoid the costly transcoding and transport costs of bringing signals back to the broadcast facility for monitoring using a traditional multiviewer,” he says.

While the general perception is that multiviewers will be installed in galleries or MCRs and cover the whole wall, Darren Gosney, technical sales manager for EMEA at Blackmagic Design, observes there is a growing realization that standalone screens can be placed anywhere in a broadcast or playout center.

“If they feature loop-throughs of each of their inputs, they can be located anywhere in the production chain,” he explains. This means different departments can each have a dedicated configurable unit in their space and the signals can be passed through to other parts of the facility, even being re-clocked to extend the signal distance further.``

Certainly a move on from the inert, dumb screens of the past.

NEW YORK—A new report on the multiviewer monitoring system market from The Insight Partners is forecasting that the business sector will grow from $1.11 billion in 2021 at an cumulative annual average growth rate of 4.9% to about $1.55 billion by 2028. 

The report found that North America held the largest share in the multiviewer monitoring system market followed by APAC and Europe and that North America will see the fastest growth in the next five years. 

It also found that the increase in digital and OTT content was a key driver in the demand for multiviewer monitoring systems as companies move to expand the video content they are monitoring. 

Moreover, the trend towards IP streaming, video walls, and use of advanced systems for enhancing security and surveillance will influence demand. 

LONDON—The screen has and always will be both the symbol of television and the means of watching it, however on both the viewing and production sides, displaying TV pictures has changed considerably in the last 20 years, when CRTs reigned supreme. While the consumer market has diversified into smaller screens on mobile devices, broadcast operations have evolved rapidly thanks to the multiviewer.

This technology has made a discernable difference to studio galleries, OB trucks and playout centers, not only in terms of layout—with only a few screens replacing banks of older style monitors—but also in how operations are carried out. More sources can be displayed in a gallery or OB vehicle and more outputs can be monitored in master control rooms (MCRs) by only a few operators. 

As John Mailhot, chief technology officer for networking products at Imagine Communication notes, multiviewers are now “the design standard” for facilities, with the previously ubiquitous walls of discreet monitors nowhere to be seen.

CUSTOMIZING THE WORKFLOW

“Equipping a facility is now more cost-effective with multiviewers,” Mailhot says. “But requirements are different in different parts of the workflow. You’ve got replay, playback and then camera shading, which might have multiviewers to keep an eye on everything and then one or two ‘real’ monitors for fine-tuning. The need is to make sure that each professional involved in the production can see what they need to see, because the more sources there are, the more the need to get in front of them.”

In the past, monitors displayed pictures while other functions were carried out around them. But as Martin Jolicoeur, strategic product manager for Grass Valley notes, “It is becoming harder to talk about the multiviewer by itself.” This, he explains, is nothing new and started to happen when multiviewers first appeared.

“Both at the user level and the product level, the expectation is for more than just seeing images,” he said. “[Multiviewers] are working in conjunction with tallies and [other] tools. In the past multiviewers worked with switchers or routers and this is something that is not changing as we make the move to cloud and software-based technologies.”

As part of this, GV has a multiviewer component in its AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform), a SaaS (Software as a Service) system that provides cloud connectivity for a range of broadcast applications. Jolicoeur says this was accelerated by the need for desktop-based multiviewing, which grew substantially during the Covid-19 pandemic. This allows remote access to the multiviewing system in MCRs, where GV’s Kaleido-IP is used for on-premises operations (as well as in studio galleries and OB trucks).

Suzana Brady, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Cobalt Digital, comments that remote control is a must for off-premises operation of multiviewer systems.

“It’s also crucial to have the ability to bring back the multiviewer output to a remote operator,” she says, “so a multiviewer at the station or studio is combined with a streaming encoder to provide a low latency feed over the internet that can be accepted by a computer, phone or tablet. We are additionally seeing a trend towards software-based multiviewers for streaming but they are typically not as feature-rich as hardware units.”

THE UBIQUITY OF IP

IP is increasingly the norm for both on-prem and remote working, covering all forms of equipment but increasingly multiviewers. An illustration of this is the recent installation at Red Bee Media’s U.K. facilities in London and Salford. The previous SDI-based monitoring infrastructure has been replaced by an IP multiviewer network based on the Rohde & Schwarz Prismon system. 

This was possible, says Andreas Loges, vice president of media technologies at R&S, because of the technology’s “software-defined approach,” which allows for a hybrid platform supporting SDI and IP signals, in both SMPTE ST 2022-6 and ST 2110.

Lawo, a leading proponent of IP now produces a multiviewer alongside its audio console and video processing/networking products. Stephan Türkay, senior product manager for media infrastructure, comments that the pandemic has pushed the adoption of IP even further, with the format now defining trends in multiviewers.

“IP technology delivers on flexibility, scalability and being totally agnostic, [making it] inherently compatible with any requested broadcast format and connecting endpoints no matter how far they are apart physically,” he says. “Native IP multiviewers have practically become state-of-the-art technology, with software-defined processing and distributed architectures. They fully embrace the benefits of IP technology and allow for a leap in dynamic management of processing resources and practically unlimited scaling.”

Today’s leading multiviewers are designed to monitor SMPTE ST 2022-6 and ST 2110 video streams, which have standardized signals and distribution for broadcasting. They are also, as Ketan Patel, product manager of multiviewer solutions at Evertz, observes, also going beyond their original display role. 

“Multiviewers remain a tool for visualized video, audio and ancillary data analysis,” he says, “but as broadcast continues to evolve, the need for more advanced and specialized monitoring features continues to grow. Some of these new requirements include monitoring for regionalized freeze and black detection, lip-sync monitoring, loudness monitoring and more.”

Multiviewers are now established in MCRs at broadcast centers and playout facilities, which handle multiple channels of both linear TV and OTT services. The trend is for fewer operators at the MCRs, with compliance monitoring software used to display images only when a problem is detected. Known as "monitoring by exception," this technique is used increasingly on the distribution side, with multiviewers working in conjunction with specialist software.

Compliance system developer Mediaproxy produces its own multiviewer, the Monwall. CEO Erik Otto explains that the Monwall was developed on the basis of the emerging trend for software-based interactive displays, with the aim of allowing live streams of both broadcast and OTT sources to be displayed and monitored.

“It works in conjunction with our LogServer monitoring platform to display any faults,” he says. “Because of the large number of outputs that need to be monitored in today’s multichannel world, it is no longer practical for MCR operators to view each channel on individual screens. Monitoring by exception is becoming the norm, with penalty boxes on multiviewers only activated when a fault is detected. This is a much more efficient way of monitoring and also uses the operators’ time and expertise more effectively.”

Broadcasting has broadened in scope over the last decade, with streaming running in parallel with linear transmission. This has called for new techniques and technologies, something illustrated by the development of the multiviewer. That evolution looks set to continue as broadcasters and OTT platforms look for new forms of content and revenue, including eSports production.

“The rapid development of complex, multi-layered production environments is challenging vendors to adapt and respond with agile, scalable and cost-efficient technologies that fit the needs of this type of production,” says Kevin Joyce, Zer0 Friction Officer at TAG Video Systems. “On the multiviewer and monitoring side, most gaming productions require the ability to work in the cloud, customizable interfaces for dispersed workforces and, of course, the ability to monitor signals from production to delivery and ensure the highest level of quality for maximum engagement.”

Issues like this are among a growing number of technological challenges the now not-so-humble multiviewer faces in the near future. As Mailhot at Imagine concludes, there is a “plethora” of video formats to deal with and that only continues to grow.

“We are seeing the beginnings of HDR, which will blossom in the next five years,” he says. “Related to that is the scaling up of UHD, which will pose a design challenge for multiviewers because it’s four times as much data and we can’t take the HD approach and just make [the displays] bigger.”

With all this happening, multiviewers are certainly something to watch. 

WASHINGTON—The explosion in content availability spurred by the OTT revolution over the past decade has only made the monitoring of such content more challenging. Mix in new concerns over social distancing and the increased demand for remote productions in less than ideal environments and it’s no wonder that production staff are looking for simple, fast responsive solutions.

Developments in multiviewers have been spurred on by ever-expanding screen sizes, higher resolutions and, perhaps most importantly, the industry’s move to the cloud and IP. However, adding or altering the pathways from signal to monitor can introduce new concerns that can negatively impact the production workflow.

SWISS ARMY KNIFE

Top of the list of concerns is ensuring production staff can get a reliable, low-latency multiviewer signal, regardless of whether they’re in a master control facility, OB truck or their basement, according to TAG’s Zer0 Friction Officer Kevin Joyce.

“Remote production and the ability to view their facilities and the streams in their homes of course has become the number one priority,” he said. “In a multiviewer, you have to be able to work in every single environment. And by environment, I mean across all four of the primary broadcast applications: live production, playout, delivery, and OTT.

“If you’re going to work across those four applications, your multiviewer has to have quite a lot of features to be the best in class across all four of those, where the multiviewer for live production has to be super-high resolution. And it has to be very low latency,” Joyce added.

Joyce describes TAG multiviewers as the “Swiss Army Knife” of multiviewers because of the product’s ability to handle a vast array of formats in uncompressed and compressed mode, plus the ability to analyze the signals.

“Customers are demanding more and more probing capabilities for us to detect more and more errors as different types of formats go into the different applications,” Joyce said. “A multiviewer needs to do more than just be able to visualize the errors. If you could actually detect the errors, then you get a ‘bigger bang for your buck,’ using probing and visualization.”

Expanded support for industry standards, along with “extreme” low latency are among the new enhancements in the company’s multiviewers, according to Joyce.

“And we’ve increased the density of our system by 50% in the last six months,” he added.

BIGGER SCREENS, HIGHER RESOLUTIONS

John Mailhot, CTO, networking and infrastructure with Imagine Communications said customers have become more focused on using higher UHD resolutions in their multiviewer products.

“Our latest crop of multiviewers are based on our Selenio Network Processors [SNP], so they’re really designed around the sort of low-latency, high-touch production—people who historically were very fussy about latency. Now whether that fussiness is still there—in the post COVID world, will they have realized that maybe a little latency didn’t hurt anybody—we’ll see,” he said.

In the early days of higher resolution displays, if a customer wanted to use a UHD signal for example in their multiviewer, they had to deal with a trade-off in capacity, according to Mailhot.

“So one of the things we really focused on in the SNP MV was just making all the displays rendered in UHD to begin with,” he said. “So every display is done in UHD and then we make an HD version of it if you need that. But we’ve sort of sized and scaled and built the whole product around creating UHD displays.”

The ability to monitor HDR is also on the customer’s wishlist as well, Mailhot said.

“We deal with HDR in a very intelligent way—you can choose whether to display it and you can pick whether it’s HLG or PQ or SLog3, of course. But then equally each of the inputs then gets harmonized into that format so that if you have an HDR production, maybe the TD wants to really see his stuff in HDR, but maybe for the replay operator who’s close to the screen, pushing HDR into their eyeballs from that distance isn’t such a good idea. “So you want to have SDR for some people on the truck and HDR for others,” he said. “And so that was a key design driver for the SNP MV.”

UNCOMPLICATED SOLUTIONS

With live sports now returning to the screen, Cobalt Digital has seen increasing demand for its multiviewer products, according to Chris Shaw, executive vice president of sales and marketing.

“We are seeing this market move forward, both in government and in the sports truck environment,” he said.

For 2020, Cobalt has added numerous features to its 9971-MV18-4K Multiviewer, including support for timecode burn for each PiP as well as multilanguage capabilities. The industry’s demand for UHD multiviewing solutions is helping drive new developments for Cobalt’s multiviewers.

“4K production is here, and broadcasters and OB truck operators need to be able to monitor content at a glance,” said Shaw. “Not only does the 9971 Series support full UHD resolution, it can handle multiple asynchronous signals simultaneously and provide full resolution display on consumer 4K monitors. It’s an uncomplicated multiviewer solution for facilities with a complicated blend of HD and 4K sources.”

There are also plans to add ST2110 support in the near future.

“With the hardware that we’re scheduled to roll out at some point next year, our existing multiviewer will be expanded to support ST2110 on all inputs and have the output as well,” said Kyle Wilken, vice president of firmware for Cobalt Digital.

MORE INTEGRATION, BETTER PERFORMANCE

Lawo’s vm_dmv is a virtual module app for the company’s V__matrix IP routing & processing platform, complementing the existing vm_mv16-4, vm_mv18-4 and vm_mv24-4 multiviewer lineup. It turns the V__matrix C100 software-defined processing blade into a distributed, flexibly expandable, true IP multiviewer. The vm_dmv is based on a distributed architecture where multiple modules network together. These modules could be hosted together in the same V__matrix frame, in different frames or even at different geographical locations. Basically anywhere as long as they are networked together via IP. 

As a relatively recent entrant into this sector, Lawo had the advantage of approaching it through the lens of all-IP, according to Stephan Türkay, senior product manager, media infrastructure at the company. Providing that offering as part of the company’s V__matrix platform allowed for a more integrated product, he added.

“Our customers coming from the baseband world are used to thinking in terms of compartmentalized multiviewer and routing solutions, which may very well be standalone offerings purchased from vendors that focus on a specific application,” Türkay said. “The move towards IP turns the overall infrastructure into a tightly integrated system with one-stop, intuitive control over switching, routing and multiviewing. In addition, virtualizing multiviewers not only expands the control and viewing options—it also allows operators to use idle resources for other processing tasks at short notice. People can do more with less by scaling up and down without adding or disconnecting physical units.”

A NEW UNIVERSE

Grass Valley has been concentrating on latency and IP for its Kaleido multiviewer product line, according to Martin Jolicoeur, director of product management for the company.

“We’re working on making processing latency on par with purpose-built FPGA-based hardware,” he said. “Obviously processing latency is important for live production staff when they’re making decisions. Another new thing is that we’re providing the ability to process up to 64 HD sources on a single server running Kaledio IP software, where considering the bandwidths of uncompressed signal formats, it’s pretty amazing.”

Kaleido is now part of the company’s new GV Media Universe, a microservice solution for SaaS and cloud-based solutions powered by Grass’s AMP (agile media processing platform).

“This multiviewer offers low bit rate, low latency streaming, which accommodates for live remote production,” Jolicoeur said. ”It includes ‘intelligent timing’ which compensates for the different streaming latencies you can have from the venue to the control room or even your home office.” 

Recent changes in remote production mean customers are streaming multiviewer signals to new and more locations, adding stress to latency, according to Jolicoeur.

“They’ll still use multiviewers in the truck, for example, but they’ll take the multiviewer output and they’ll stream that over cloud to the home or the facilities so that the creative staff is not on site and use that for making decisions, so that’s a main driver for making decisions,” he said. “And that latency has to be as low as possible.”

BEAVERTON, Ore.—Apantac has rolled out its latest product at ISE 2020, the MiniDE-4-QUHD 8K multiviewer.

The MiniDE-4-QUHD accepts four HDMI 2.0 inputs and four HDMI 2.0 outputs up to 4K at 60 fps, and an output resolution of 7680x4320. It also has two primary modes—the multiviewer mode and video wall processor mode.

Multiviewer mode allows users to feed four 4K inputs into an 8K monitor or a 2x2 4K monitor stack. The position, size and aspect ratio of the source windows are user adjustable. In video wall processor mode, the system drives four 4K monitors and displays the source signal feeding one of the four inputs in various layouts and arrangements.

For more information, visit www.apantac.com. 

AMSTERDAM—One of the highlights of Apantac’s stand at this year’s IBC conference—Sept. 13-17 in Amsterdam—will be the addition of UHD outputs to its line of multiviewers, including the Mi-16, Mx-32, Mi-8 12G and Di-16.

Adding UHD outputs to its line of multiviewers enables the source window PIPs to be displayed with twice the horizontal number of pixels and twice the number of lines on a UHD panel. Apantac’s multiviewers can be paired with off-the-shelf UHD displays to create a multi-image display processing system.

Apantac’s updated multiviewers will be on display at stand 8.E43 during IBC 2019.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Aug. 13, 2019 – Cobalt Digital will showcase its card-based 4K and HDR workflow solutions for openGear® frames next month at IBC2019 in Amsterdam (Stand 10.B44). Product highlights will include its new decoders and encoders, RIST Main Profile, bi-directional SDR/HDR conversion solution for live production, and new multiviewers and distribution amplifiers. Plus, the company will debut a new 12G openGear router and RIST gateway solution.

The new 9992-DEC Series of HEVC/AVC/MPEG-2 decoders for openGear frames will be introduced at the show. Like the company’s 9992-ENC series of encoders, the flexible 9992-DEC features pay-as-you-go licensing, so users only pay for required features when needed. Designed to meet the most stringent requirements for today’s broadcasters, the 9992-DEC supports up to 4K resolution and offers a full complement of audio decoding capabilities. The series also includes the 9992-2DEC dual-channel decoder, as well as the 9992-DEC-4K-HEVC with single-channel 4K or dual-channel 2K and support for H.265.

Earlier this year, Cobalt was one of several companies to receive an Emmy® Award for its collaborative work on ARQ, the underlying technology powering RIST. At IBC, Cobalt will debut support for the RIST Main Profile, which adds features such as encryption (DTLS or PSK), tunneling, NAT traversal, point-to-multipoint distribution, low bit rate optimization, and reliable ST-2110 transport.

New advancements in HDR at the show include a complete end-to-end HDR workflow within Cobalt’s 9904-UDX-4K up/down/cross converter. Utilizing Technicolor’s suite of HDR tools, which can be bundled into a single ordering option, the 9904 can generate dynamic metadata when converting from HDR to SDR and back to HDR, preserving the full HDR picture information.

Cobalt continues to develop its popular 9971 Series of multiviewers, adding dual outputs and user controls. Delivering uncomplicated monitoring of asynchronous 4K and HD signals, all three models accommodate a variety of signals and applications. All models also include HDMI outputs for economical viewing on consumer-grade 4K monitors. One-button template presets simplify setup, but users can also create and save customized layouts. Up to five 9971 can be installed in one 2 RU openGear frame – and multiple cards in a cascaded chain can provide multiviewer layouts of up to 64 sources.

The new 9915 Series of DAs support 4K 12G-SDI sources and allow for copper runs long enough to reach most equipment within master control. One of four models in the series, the 9915DA-4x16-XPT-12G, includes four input channels that can be crosspoint-routed to 16 DA outputs in several configurations. Up to 10 cards can be installed in one openGear frame, allowing for up to 40 channels of input and distribution to up to 160 outputs.

“Broadcasters now accept 4K as the production norm, and Cobalt has an extensive menu of openGear-based solutions for studios and mobile production,” Chris Shaw, executive vice president of sales and marketing, Cobalt Digital. “Our products provide flexible and affordable ways to process, monitor, and distribute 4K and HDR content.”

Other products at the Cobalt booth will include a new 12G-SDI openGear routing card with a 12x12 routing matrix. Designed to fit into legacy frames, the card helps customers use 4K islands cost effectively. Demonstrating leadership of RIST technology, Cobalt is also launching SafeLink, an openGear solution that can take in multiple transport streams and provide a RIST wrapper to protect video links between two points.

About Cobalt Digital
Cobalt Digital Inc. designs and manufactures award-winning edge devices that help live video production and master control clients transition to IP, 4K, HDR, the cloud, and beyond. As a founding partner in the openGear® initiative and proud member of SMPTE, Cobalt also offers a best-of-breed interoperability platform that simplifies technological adoption. Distributed through a worldwide network of dealers, system integrators, and other partners, Cobalt Digital products are backed with a five-year warranty. Learn more at www.cobaltdigital.com. 

BETZDORF, Luxembourg—Satellite operator SES will be relying on the TAG Video Systems MCM-9000 multiviewer and monitoring platform to keep an eye on the TV, radio and data signals that are transmitted via satellite through its new Service Management Center at its headquarters in Luxembourg.

The MCM-9000 is a software application that can run on commercial off-the-shelf servers or in a virtualized environment. It has IP monitoring technology combined with an IP multiviewer for all broadcast layers. SES says it will use the unit for monitoring MPEG compressed signals, as well as monitoring for uncompressed 2022-6/7 and 2110, JPEG2000 TR-01, MPEG2/4/HEVC transport streams and OTT signals. Multiple UHD or HD video mosaic outputs of the monitored services are presented with data and overlay alerts that can be viewed anywhere.

Working with NICE, TAG created a number of high-quality mosaic “video wall” presentations of the monitored services for SES.

IBC 2019, 13-17 September, Hall 7 Stand A01: Cinegy, the global leader for broadcast playout software on premise, hybrid and in the cloud, will demonstrate the multiple advantages of the inclusion of Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) as well as the 8K capabilities of its entire product range at IBC 2019.

Cinegy Head of Product Management Lewis Kirkaldie said, “SRT is an extra bit of magic that breaks the restrictive chains of having to establish connectivity by plugging in a cable somewhere. Through SRT, the ability to ensure a signal gets to and from where it needs to be is now both feasible and widely available.

“What that means is that with SRT you can locate content, tools, and services wherever your business needs them, be it in the cloud, on rented virtual machines, on-prem, or at remote data centres.”

Cinegy’s view is that the maturity of SRT opens the door to a sizable range of new applications while vastly simplifying existing ones.

“SRT is a massive liberator,” further explained Kirkaldie. “SRT makes system design so much easier. You can design exactly what you want to deliver, with precisely the results you need, irrespective of inputs, outputs, or location. There is no longer any reason to compromise your business goals due to connectivity or bandwidth limitations.”

SRT is baked in to Cinegy software, including the license, which removes any concerns about whether users have the legal right, proper subscription, or adequate bandwidth to deploy the software.

In the case of 8K, Cinegy has optimised its entire product line to be 8K-ready and deployed in the cloud. The new Cinegy Multiviewer, in addition to being 8K capable, has had its already impressive GPU optimisation further improved. This makes the Multiviewer even more powerful and flexible when paired with Cinegy Air PRO Playout and Cinegy Capture PRO Ingest.

The twin benefits of increased scalability and efficiency in Cinegy Air PRO are equally beneficial features for Cinegy Capture PRO. Using the same hardware, both systems are not only capable of capturing 8K in 10-bit at up to 60, but also four channels of UHD/4K.

Cinegy products can process mixed SD, HD, 4K/UHD, and 8K formats - as well as handle HDR - for capture, playout, monitoring, news, editing, or MAM. All of the products displayed at IBC 2019 are available for immediate deployment.

###

About Cinegy
Cinegy develops software solutions for collaborative workflow encompassing IP, capture, editing and playout services tools, integrated into an active archive for full digital asset management. Either SaaS, virtualizable stacks, cloud or on-premises, Cinegy is COTS using standard IT hardware, and non-proprietary storage technology. Cinegy products are reliable, affordable, scalable, easily deployable and intuitive. Cinegy is truly Software Defined Television. Visit www.cinegy.com for more details.

Cinegy PR Contact:
Jennie Marwick-Evans
Manor Marketing
jennie@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 7748 636171

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Technologies that help broadcasters improve content production have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. However, as their capabilities are expanding, the tools to do so are actually shrinking—in terms of numbers and physical size. That is becoming more and more true with multiviewers, which once were simply key devices to monitor quality but now are taking on more production responsibilities, while also addressing the transition to IP and 4K/UHD workflows.

The emergence of IP and 4K as key components has been occurring over the last several years, and while multiviewers have adapted to meet those trends specifically, the integration of new technology to meet these standards has also boosted multiviewers’ ability to handle other issues as part of the production process.

ADDING TO THE TOOLBELT

Once upon a time, multiviewers were simply a gathering of channels that were monitored by a couple of operators. But, as John Mailhot, the chief technical officer for networking and infrastructure with Imagine Communications highlights, production systems are getting more complicated and are operating from new virtual environments.

“There’s a lot of pressure on multiviewers to be more than just a bunch of pictures,” Mailhot says. “In the playout world, there’s a lot of trends for the multiviewers to have more telemetry on the screen, more alarming, variations on penalty boxes or other timeout things. Basically the multiviewer is becoming a symbiotic part of the enterprise alongside the operator and really helping the operator to manage the complexity in front of them.”

This symbiosis has been a big part of Imagine’s Versio line for years, according to Mailhot, ensuring that playout systems have the most accurate information. Likewise, the continued growth of IP—a multi-year trend for multiviewers—requires Imagine’s gear to be able to handle new sets of standards. This led to the recent certification of the Epic MV platform multiviewer for the SMPTE 2110 video transport protocol.

“We have a full set of support in our multiviewers for SMPTE 2110; on the input side, on the output side, including redundancy,” Mailhot explains. “One of the key features of the 2110 feature is that you can have redundant switch boards in a facility, which means you have redundant connections to all the things that are important, and I think most producers agree that the multiviewer is important.”

Grass Valley also keeps adding to its product lineup to address the new expectations from operators and new formats (IP, 12G SDI, 4K), including loudness monitoring, SCTE monitoring, tallies, source names, integrations with routers and switchers. “As we advance our multiviewers to support these new formats, we bring along the feature set that we’ve been providing to our users over the years,” says Martin Jolicoeur, director of multiviewer products for the Montreal-based company.

BUILDING IN HI-RES CAPABILITIES

An increasing number of productions are being shot and distributed in 4K HDR, and with the 2020 Summer Olympics on the horizon that need is only going to increase. As a result, many multiviewer vendors are seeking to address their 4K/HDR monitoring capabilities.

When monitoring HDR, Jolicoeur says ensuring that the source format and display match is key to getting the colors and dynamic range to look right. Grass Valley’s solution has been to add builtin fundamental HDR processing into its Kaleido and MV8 series multiviewers.

The use of IP with 4K displays has also been an issue that Grass has sought to address, according to Jolicoeur. Noticing a “missing link” between IP outputs to HDMI in some of these 4K displays, Grass developed the IP VU, which connects IP outputs to 4K displays so “you can view any mosaic or any source on a display,” Jolicoeur says.

Lawo is tackling the processing capacity needed to handle 4K monitoring on multiviewer systems. Multiviewers can only handle so much data, but Lawo’s Distributed Multiviewer uses an algorithm to create “subresolutions” of images to ease the processing requirements for a unit. The subresolutions create quarter resolutions of 4K sources, as well as quarter resolutions of the subresolution until there is an equivalent source that is 1/256 of the original image. The DMV system can then divide the workload among however many cards are in the system, assigning specific subresolution sources to a specific monitor.

Recently expanding upon this ability, Lawo’s Liveview Decoder takes this same capability that is typically used for uncompressed sources and brings it to compressed sources, i.e. H.264, HEVC, OTT. “It basically decodes them and creates the subresolution, but in software, and then pushes them out on the network, so it’s now available for the whole cluster to work with,” says Erling Hedkvist, senior vice president and business development manager with Lawo.

“The industry is moving, maybe slowly, but it is moving toward 4K,” continues Hedkvist. “So we’re talking about quadrupling the size of the bandwidth that needs to be monitored… using this technology, we can grow multiviewers to infinite sizes.”

TRANSITIONING FROM HARDWARE TO SOFTWARE

While many vendors are expanding the capabilities of their multiviewer systems, others are reducing the devices’ physical size as they transition from hardware platforms to software-based systems.

Since its founding 11 years ago, Israeli-based TAG Video Systems has been developing software-based IP multiviewers, which TAG Senior Advisor Kevin Joyce says gives customers the option to customize their multiviewers for different tasks. TAG—which recently opened its first U.S. office in Los Angeles—has continued to develop their technology and about a year and a half ago introduced a deployment that was 100% software in the 2110 standard.

“That type of flexibility between format, between functionality and being able to go across all the applications is completely changing the way people are thinking about setting up probing, multiviewing and monitoring in their facilities,” Joyce says.

However, there are some that still want the assurance of a hardware-based system. This has led companies like Grass Valley to include software-defined features in their hardware, or as Jolicoeur prefers to call it, “reprogrammable hardware”—“the concept of having a product, or a modular product that can evolve with using the same hardware.”

PROVIDING ALTERNATIVES TO IP

Broadcasters are embracing IP for multiviewers; according to Joliceour, 25% of such systems that Grass Valley deploys are IP-based. However, some companies are still offering SDI systems for those not yet ready to fully embrace IP.

Grass Valley’s MV8 series, for instance, works with 12G SDI while Cobalt Digital has a new version of its 9971 series of multiviewers designed to handle UHD with both 12G SDI and 3G SDI outputs, noting that SDI is a fraction of the cost of IP and requires less training for staff.

But IP is poised to be the standard; Cobalt designed the 9971 series so it could integrate with SMPTE 2110. “We believe a hybrid SDI and IP solution will be required in the marketplace for some time,” said Jacob Kinsey, chief development officer for Cobalt.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – April 3, 2019 – Between its 4K and HDR workflow solutions, as well as promotion of a new internet transport protocol, Cobalt Digital will demonstrate a number of technologies for broadcasters next week at the 2019 NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nev. The company will showcase its full complement of card-based solutions for openGear® frames for 4K and HDR workflows at Booth SL9111. Plus, on April 7 in Las Vegas, the company will receive an Emmy® Award for “Pioneering Reliable Transmission Method for Live Contribution and Distribution TV Links.”

The Emmy was awarded to several companies for their collaborative work on RIST, the Reliable Internet Stream Transport protocol, which allows for low-latency video transport of MPEG-2 content over the internet. Cobalt is also a founding company of the RIST Forum, which was established in late March to promote the standard. The RIST Forum will host a free panel discussion about the protocol on April 9 at NAB, and attendees are encouraged to register for the panel at www.rist.tv/register-for-nab-2019-panel.

“We are encouraged by the positive reaction to the new RIST protocol, and we are excited to share our new solutions for 4K and HDR production at NAB,” explained Chris Shaw, executive vice president of sales and marketing, Cobalt Digital. “4K has become the production norm, whether or not 4K is actually being distributed by broadcasters and other content providers, and interest in HDR continues to grow. Our openGear-based solutions provide affordable and flexible ways to process, monitor, and distribute 4K and HDR content.”

A cost-effective choice for contribution, distribution, ENG, streaming, and other broadcast applications, the flexible 9992-ENC series of HEVC/AVC/MPEG-2 encoders for openGear® frames offers customized I/O options and extensive audio support. It offers low-latency 8-bit and 10-bit 4:2:0 encoding, with optional license keys for HEVC and 4:2:2 encoding. Its pay-as-you-go licensing structure means users only pay for required features when needed. The 9992-ENC base model includes on 3G-SDI input, but can be upgraded to support four 3G-SDI (1080p60) signals or one 12G-SDI signal (4Kp60).

For uncomplicated monitoring of asynchronous 4K and HD signals, Cobalt offers the new 9971 Series of multiviewers. There are three models in the series designed to accommodate a variety of signals and applications. Up to five 9971 can be installed in one 2 RU openGear frame – and multiple cards can be included in a cascaded chain to provide multiviewer layouts of up to 64 sources. One-button template presets simplify setup, but users can also create and save customized layouts. All models also include HDMI outputs for economical viewing on consumer-grade 4K monitors.

Also at NAB, Cobalt will demonstrate its new 9914 Series of distribution amplifiers, which support 4K 12G-SDI sources and allow for copper runs long enough to reach most equipment within master control. The 9914DA-4x16-XPT-12G, one of four models in the series, includes four input channels that can be crosspoint-routed to 16 DA outputs in several configurations. Up to 10 cards can be installed in one openGear frame, allowing for up to 40 channels of input and distribution to up to 160 outputs.

Cobalt’s 9904-UDX-4K up/down/cross converter and image processor provides an economical SDR-to-HDR and HDR-to-SDR conversion for 4K ad HD live sports. The card allows production truck operators to convert legacy cameras, servers, graphics systems, and other SDR sources for HDR productions. As a result, the 9904-UDX-4K reduces the need for new equipment purchases to produce HDR footage, and eliminates the need for separate SDR and HDR cameras and processing paths.

About Cobalt Digital
Cobalt Digital Inc. designs and manufactures award-winning edge devices that help live video production and master control clients transition to IP, 4K, HDR, the cloud, and beyond. As a founding partner in the openGear® initiative and proud member of SMPTE, Cobalt also offers a best-of-breed interoperability platform that simplifies technological adoption. Distributed through a worldwide network of dealers, system integrators, and other partners, Cobalt Digital products are backed with a five-year warranty. Learn more at www.cobaltdigital.com. 

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Rapid-fire changes in the television industry in the past 15 years have made multiviewers an essential component in virtually all studios. Of course, nothing stands still for long, and as workflows, processes and standards change, so too change how multiviewers work.

With the acceptance of IP video and the SMPTE 2110 along with other related standards, multiviewers are now starting to show up with full IP video capability. That said, most facilities today do not have media distribution via SMPTE 2110 networks, so there is still a good market for multiviewers that accept signals the old-fashioned way: SDI and HDMI.

HIGHER RESOLUTIONS

In addition to the new IP video transport standard, there is an increasing need for multiviewers to work with 4K/Ultra HD (3,840 x 2,160-pixel) video.

“Our largest model, the MultiView 16, has 16 independent 6G-SDI inputs so customers can connect any combination of SD, HD or Ultra HD sources and monitor them all simultaneously on a single display,” said Bob Caniglia, director of sales for North America for Blackmagic Design. “It has router-style controls on the front panel, along with the LCD and spin knob, which lets you adjust settings, route sources to different views, add overlays and more. Output can be set to a 2x2, 3x3 or 4x4 grid, and you can solo any source full-screen.”

Blackmagic Design’s MultiView 16 and MultiView 4 (a four-input model) feature remote control via IP using the included Mac and Windows software. MultiView 16 also features remote control via IP using Blackmagic Videohub hardware control panels. In addition, MultiView 4 supports power over Ethernet (PoE+), which can be used to remotely power the device.

[Read: NAB Show Product Review — Signal Processing & Analysis]

Likewise, For-A uses IP control to permit fast reconfiguring of its multiviewers and integration with the company’s switcher line.

“Having the switcher, router and multiviewers in combination allows the operator to maintain consistent source naming and tally information between all subsystems,” said Bob Peterson, product specialist for For-A Corporation of America. “The switcher can also map its program buttons to directly control the router’s crosspoints, which makes configuration of 4K UHD easier. All our multiviewers can tightly integrate with For-A switchers.”

Peterson said that all For-A multiviewers use IP networks as the primary method of layout and control. Some of the company’s multiviewers have hardware control panels, and all For-A multiviewers have web GUIs for basic control functions and can stream screen output and error information over IP for logging purposes.

“The publication of SMPTE ST 2110, as well as ongoing work by industry bodies such as AIMS and AMWA, has now given our customers the confidence to invest in IP solutions.” — Martin Jolicoeur, Grass Valley

FULL-BORE IP VIDEO

Going all-in with IP video is not hard to find among multiviewer manufacturers.

“The publication of SMPTE ST 2110, as well as ongoing work by industry bodies such as AIMS and AMWA, has now given our customers the confidence to invest in IP solutions,” said Martin Jolicoeur, director product line management for Grass Valley. “We are committed to helping our customers make the transition to IP at a pace that suits their business and operational needs, whether that’s getting them IP-ready or going all-IP.”

Jolicoeur said that Grass Valley customers can futureproof while still maintaining their current SDI environment using the company’s Kaleido-Modular-X, which allows them to upgrade to full IP when needed. The addition of an IP input card supports monitoring of SMPTE 2022-6 video-over-IP using dual 10 GigE IP inputs.

Jolicoeur said that the Kaleido IP multiviewer-native IP solution delivers the highest number of simultaneous video and audio decodes in the industry, with an unlimited number of audio decodes (stereo and 5.1) per program. It also supports SMPTE ST 2110 and 2022-6, DVB MPEG TS and OTT monitoring of streaming formats.

Also falling into the full-bore IP video category is the Apantac T-Sharp, which allows IP inputs such as H.264 and ST 2022/2010. The T-Sharp and other Apantac multiviewers can decode incoming streams and display the video signals as part of the multiviewer’s output. Apantac multiviewers support formats from analog video to SD/HD/3G/12G, HDMI, 2022/2010 and H.264 as inputs.

In addition to its broad support of IP video, Apantac’s multiviewers have IP control capability that is manufacturer agnostic.

“Apantac multiviewers allow IP control using not only Apantac’s own software, they also allow all popular control systems such as Crestron and AMX,” said Thomas Tang, president of Apantac in Portland, Ore. “IP control also allows the multiviewer to communicate with third-party products such as production switchers and routers for dynamic names and tallies.”

CLEAN SHEET

If you are a manufacturer and want to create a multiviewer line in 2018, where do you start on your clean-sheet design? In the case of Lawo, you head right for IP.

“As we don’t have any SDI-legacy [multiviewers], our products are developed as true IP-native products,” said Andreas Hilmer, director marketing and communications for the Germany-based company. “Our multiviewers … are true IP multiviewers with 10/40GB network connectivity, plus additional SDI IO if needed, running on Lawo’s V__matrix software-defined processing blades. All our products are based on IP technology using open standards in line with the AIMS roadmap, such as ST2110, SMPTE2022-6/-6 and AES67.”

In conversations with engineers tasked with making IP video work in their facilities, I’ve been told that SDI was still the way to go for maximum reliability and a trouble-free out-of-the-box experience. However, that was before SMPTE 2110 and related standards were finalized. With strong standards supporting IP video, it looks like many manufacturers are getting the product out there, ready for the demand that they expect will follow.

There are many other aspects to multiviewers that need to be researched before you decide to commit to a specific product. IP video is just one of many recent developments to make it all the way through standards creation to manufactured products, giving engineers more flexibility and choice in system design and operations. IP video — as implemented in multiviewers and other products — is now mainstream.

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ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Multiviewers have changed the way video is monitored every place video needs to be monitored. From security applications to the Academy Awards to the Super Bowl, nobody creates video today professionally without monitoring it using multiviewers.

Kyle Wilken of Cobalt Digital inspects the company’s 9970-QS cards on NCP mobile production truck.

Compared to the alternative—using individual monitors for each signal—multiviewers hold many advantages. Three of the biggest are that they allow monitoring to occur in a much smaller space; using multiviewers creates much less heat; and highquality monitoring is far less expensive with multiviewers. Cheaper, better, cooler... it’s the trifecta of benefits.

In particular, working with multiviewers scores big time with sports producers. With most big-league sports produced out of remote trucks, multiviewers are prized for their reduced footprint, lower heat generation and greater ruggedness over the alternative of individual monitors. Most high-end sports production today takes place using 4K-capable production trucks, so multiviewers have had to keep pace with the 4K world.

“When it comes to live production, sports has always been on the forefront of innovation,” said Mark Horchler, senior vice president of marketing for Australia-based Mediaproxy.

Display using a Mediaproxy Monwall multiviewer

DISPLAY FLEXIBILITY
Horchler said that display flexibility is key for sports producers, something that fits well with Mediaproxy’s software-based multiviewers.

“A software-based multiviewer enables it to keep up with the latest technologies such as HEVC and MPEG-DASH,” he said. “As a member of the AIMS Alliance, the Mediaproxy Monwall multiviewer is being integrated within new IP-based live-production workflows. As standards for IP video continues to evolve, customers—especially sports broadcasters—will be able to benefit.”

Cobalt Digital, which introduced a 4K multiviewer module at the 2017 NAB Show, takes a different approach to multiviewers than most, with a modular system that can be cascaded to create complex displays.

“[Our] core customer base is sports production,” said Bob McAlpine, CEO of Champagne, Ill.-based Cobalt Digital. “Our new 9971-MV6-4K platform is cascadable and very similar in concept to the QS series but instead of five inputs, it has six and instead of 3G-SDI, the MV6-4K supports 12G-SDI on each of its coax inputs. An 18-input version will also be available, as well as a version that adds four HDMI 2.0 inputs to the six coax.”

Two of Cobalt Digital’s customers—NEP and CSP Mobile Productions—are popular providers of production trucks for large sports events.

SAM Multiviewer display

4K PRODUCTION
Concerning the adoption of 4K as a production standard for high-end sports, what are the right questions to ask when shopping for multiviewer systems?

“Is the input density right?,” asked Peter Timmons, product manager for multiviewers at U.K.-based Snell Advanced Media (SAM). “With the increased resolution of 4K displays and associated sizes, it is now possible to increase the number of sources displayed on a single multiviewer screen without affecting the image or scaling quality.”

Timmons also suggests that customers ask whether the supplier can provide all form factors that they may need using the same technology, setups and man-machine interfaces.

Also, can the supplier flexibly support UHD/4K inputs and outputs, as well as UHD/4K over IP?

Does the supplier have other technologies to reduce the cost of operations in multiviewing environments, and are control and monitoring tools integrated within the multiviewer?

Timmons pointed out that SAM’s multiviewers feature one frame of latency and can monitor up to 32 channels of audio with 16 onscreen displays per source, both important features for fast-paced live sports production.

Although sports production is moving quickly to 4K, that doesn’t mean that everything needs to be changed to a 4K device.

Apantac Tahoma-LE-4 multiviewer

“Even though sports production is going 4K, most of our customers are monitoring in 3G,” said Thomas Tang, president of Portland, Ore.-based Apantac. “It is important to be able to accept 4K, but it isn’t a requirement that every input should support 4K. Flexibility is the key.”

Going beyond production trucks, Tang said that Apantac’s multiviewers’ light weight, small size and low-power consumption make them ideal for flight packs and other compact production systems.

What about high dynamic range?

“We believe that 4K will only fly if it will come together with HDR,” said Felix Krückels, director of business development for Germany-based Lawo. “That means that the multiviewer also should be able today, or at least in the future, to support HDR. Both formats, UHD and HDR, will be for a long time combined with all existing formats we have today such as SD, HD, 3G and others, which is another common request we get for our multiviewer.”

SOFTWARE-ONLY
Cinegy took a completely different path to its multiviewers—it is a software-only product that runs on a PC and works with the computer’s display card to provide multiviewer display. The company has set its software up for NVidia display cards but doesn’t rule out working with other card manufacturers.

“We get ‘best of both worlds’ benefits,” said Lewis Kirkaldie, head of product management at the Germany-based company. “As software, we can use NVidia GPUs to drive down the cost of the platform and get 16 HD decode streams from a single board [and we support up to four boards]. The world is changing quickly to IP, and we are lucky to be able to use this technology to offer customers traditional SDI monitoring, SMPTE 2022-6 uncompressed or H.264 compressed streams.”

Kirkaldie pointed out that Cinegy’s software approach has allowed it to provide some advanced features that include support for decoding all subtitle standards, as well as adding HEVC monitoring.

Two of Cinegy’s sports customers include Sports Editing Sweden for the Swedish hockey league, and Dogan TV.

Many companies have multiviewers, including Blackmagic Design, Evertz, Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Craltech, Decimator Design, Matrox, Mividi, Swit and Kramer. Some companies, such as Panasonic, Blackmagic Design, For-A, Grass Valley, SAM, Sony, Roland and Ross Video either have multiviewer capability built into production switchers or offer it as an option. And this latter choice is not just for smaller operations—you can get a powerful production switcher that includes multiviewer output with every possible bell and whistle.

Multiviewers are not just for sports production, of course. They are pretty much indispensible for all live video production and large-scale monitoring, which is why they are now so common and affordable.

There are a lot of choices out there, and some may be better choices for you depending on the production gear you already own.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—In the professional television industry, many things have changed over the past 20 years. In studios worldwide, one of the most visible changes is the monitoring revolution caused by the convergence of multiviewers and large low-cost flat-screen displays.

Renard Jenkins, vice president of operations for PBS, shows off one of the network’s master control pods. The combination of these two recent technologies provided a completely new look for control rooms and made individual displays obsolete practically overnight.

At PBS’s network control in Alexandria, Va., there are multiple monitoring pods built around pairs of large displays, with each display showing 18 images of various sizes, each identified with its source name. Multiple pods can be used to monitor the network’s activity, including ingests and feeds to its member stations.

However, a pod in the corner has a special task: It is identical to and in constant communication with another pod in a Midwestern city, where the network’s control can be switched in the event of a disaster. Called the “Diversity Disaster Maintenance System,” a multiviewer at either end packages the video streams onto a private Ethernet line that runs between Alexandria and the Midwestern city.

“It’s important for us that we can see all the activity that’s happening, either from a playout standpoint or an uplink standpoint,” said Chris Homer, vice president of engineering for PBS. “This is our first foray into an IP broadcast infrastructure. It’s a very inexpensive way to get lots of channels onto a single monitor.”

At PBS’s main monitoring pods, the network typically manages 14 broadcast feeds simultaneously. Each of the main pods are configured to monitor these signals, with each video image paired with an audio level indicator. Any individual signal can be called up for closer scrutiny on a solo display, as well as inspecting it on a waveform monitor.

Apantac LI multiviewer “The multiviewer allows us to see all of those channels, and it also allows us to make sure that we have captions and that the audio is monitored,” said Renard Jenkins, vice president of operations for PBS. “One person cannot watch and listen to all 14 channels at the same time, but visually you can see that you have everything that you’re supposed to have on the channels. It also allows us to change this layout based on, say, a live event in which we set our number one channel to the live event. But we still have to pay attention to all those other channels.”

DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION

 In the future, Jenkins said that the network plans to use multiviewers to monitor some of its digital distribution paths, such as OTT playout through iTunes, Hulu and other distributors.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually use a multiviewer to see what’s going on the down end of that,” he said. “Pull up one of our on-demand things and take a look at it. If we see something on our side that the aggregator didn’t catch, we can make that repair then give them a call to resubmit this because we noticed “X” during playback.”

There are many manufacturers of multiviewers that service the needs of professional television facilities. Making a wide range of products to serve a spectrum of needs, multiviewer processors are available from small standalone desktop boxes to complex rackframe systems.

Of course, a multiviewer’s output is viewed on a display, so what do multiviewer manufacturers suggest for the optimum displays?

“There are several features that users should look for in 4K/UHD displays, although display manufacturers do not always divulge all the detailed specifications, and often the customer will need to dig into the specs on their own,” said Thomas Tang, president of Apantac. “The following points are what the customer should keep in mind when choosing a 4K/UHD display:

When the display specifications state HDMI 2.0, you should ask whether it supports 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 at 60 Hz. Some displays support HDMI 2.0 in 4:2:2, but only at 30 Hz. This can make a big difference in quality.

If you need 4K/UHD in 4:2:2 at 60 Hz, the display may support this specification in DisplayPort rather than HDMI 2.0.

When the display supports DisplayPort in 4:2:2 at 60 Hz, is it SST or MST? This may determine whether the image will show up on the display or not.

Operations Technician Rodney Fitzgerald keeps an eye on the network feeds at PBS’s control facility in Alexandria, Va. Is the display 4K or UHD? 4K is 4,096 x 2,160 pixels; UHD is 3,840 x 2,160 pixels. This feature can make a big difference in price.”

“Due to fierce competition, display manufacturers in the consumer and prosumer markets are in perpetual price wars that makes the technology affordable,” said Jesse Foster, director of products & business development for Cobalt Digital Inc. “They continue to introduce enhanced capabilities that have positive implications for the professional user such as high frame rate, wide color gamut and high dynamic range. The advancement of the HDMI 2.0 standard used in the consumer space already brings support for 3,840 x 2,160-pixel displays at 60 fps, and the professional market will see the ST-2082 12G-SDI standard being offered in broadcast- and reference-grade monitors.”

WELL-DEFINED NEEDS

 If the past two decades have taught us anything, it is that change is inevitable. Although you may have well-defined multiviewer needs today, that could change dramatically in a year or two.

“Television facilities should look for a multiviewer that is flexible enough to support demanding workflows now, as well as equipped with future-proof tools to expand and grow with a facility’s needs,” said Bob Caniglia, senior manager for key accounts at Blackmagic Design. “Facilities should invest in a multiviewer that is native Ultra HD with multi-rate 6G-SDI inputs with full frame re-synchronization and separate loop-through outputs, making it compatible with existing equipment. This will also allow the multiviewer to support any combination of SD, HD and Ultra HD formats and frame rates all at the same time, on the same display, further enhancing flexibility. A multiviewer should also supply the technical features that facilities need, such as audio meters, custom view labels, tally indicators and more.”

“Customers are looking for a multiviewer being able to monitor SD, HD, 3G and 4K signals, with ability to expand the system as facility grows,” said Ketan Patel, product manager for multiviewer systems at Evertz.

Patel pointed out that digital streams will increasingly be part of what a multiviewer must handle, in addition to SDI. These include uncompressed-over-IP and compressed signals such as MPEG2, H.264, HEVC and JPEG2000.

There are many manufacturers of multiviewers in addition to the companies mentioned above. These include Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Craltech, Decimator Design, Matrox, Mividi, Swit and Kramer.

A modern control facility could be built without using a multiviewer, but it would be expensive, inefficient and inflexible. Some technologies represent the promise of the “better mousetrap”—going back to the way it was before multiviewers is simply inconceivable.

HAMILTON, N.J.—Multiviewers have long been essential for displaying a mosaic of different video sources on a single display device during live production, and for confidence monitoring in a network operation center, among other applications.

But as the broadcast industry transitions from SDI to IP, and resolutions climb to 4K/UHD and beyond, mixing and matching these disparate new formats and standards for display on a single screen poses a technical challenge.

BOLD NEW WORLD
As with our industry’s previous technology shifts—from analog to digital and SD to HD—the migration from HD to UHD and SDI to IP is gradual. During this hybrid phase, Apantac President Thomas Tang says that broadcasters need to ask themselves where they are in this transition before investing in new multiviewers.

“Some broadcasters may be ready to go IP in a big way,” Tang said. “If they’re rebuilding their plant or replacing legacy gear for future-proof solutions, we’re capable of mixing and matching everything they want on a single multiviewer platform right now, including 2022-6, composite video, H.264, 4KUHD, HDMI and more, with our T# [pronounced T Sharp] multiviewer line. But if they feel their future plans are uncertain, or that they’d prefer to wait for the many new IP standards to fully settle down before they commit to a large purchase, our new Mi-16 is a low-cost, transitional solution that will buy them some extra capacity and time.”

Mi-16 handles 16x1 SD/HD/3G signals for under $2,500 and can be easily upgraded to 16x2. And, for those with a few available slots on their Open Gear frames, Apantac also makes economical CVBS/SD/HD/3G and 4K UHD-capable Open Gear multiviewer cards.

When it comes to mixing and matching different formats, multiviewers must first scale them to a common format for processing, such as SDI or 2022-6—which was designed to transport high bit-rate media over IP—and then output them to formats like HDMI, DVI or SDI for output to the display device.

According to Tang, the T#’s universal input module performs input, scaling and mixing of signals as an integrated part of the multiviewer platform, rather than relying on outboard converter boxes. “Whenever you involve external converters, there is an extra layer of ‘finger pointing,’” Tang said, “And if something goes wrong, you’re left determining who or what is responsible.” Developed within the last two years, the T#’s architecture is designed to handle new and emerging standards.

MONITORING BY EXCEPTION
With several multiviewers capable of mixing native 4K UHD, uncompressed IP and SDI/baseband within the frame, U.K.-based Snell Advanced Media custom-tailors configurations to the unique needs of broadcasters migrating from SDI to IP. “Our technology gives broadcasters the flexibility to work the way they want today, yet future-proof their operations for the way they envision working in the future,” said Peter Timmons, multiviewer product manager for SAM.

For those that prefer baseband, SAM’s multiviewer solutions support 4K as well as IP. SAM’s MV800 is based on 48x12 I/O multiviewer cards that reside in dedicated MV slots of SAM’s Sirius 800 router frame for integrated operation. In the future, SAM plans to support 12G for customers who prefer baseband to IP.

For those considering a greenfield IP site, SAM will soon launch an IP multiviewer based on MV800 technology with support for 2022-6, TR-03, VC2 and other uncompressed IP standards. And, for hybrid facilities, SAM has multiviewers that accept both baseband and IP streams and convert them within the frame.

At the 2016 IBC Show, SAM will introduce MV800 Desktop, offering H.264 compressed versions of the MV800’s inputs, enabling people to do remote confidence monitoring from their desktops. SAM will also debut a software-based IP multiviewer.

Timmons said that SAM’s solutions combine control and monitoring workflow schematics with multiviewer video presentations to alert operators to potential problems.

CONVERTING TO 2022-6
The plethora of new video standards is one of the main challenges in multiviewer technology today, according to Ketan Patel, multiviewer product manager for Evertz in Burlington, Ont. “Our MVP signal monitoring platform has long allowed a mix of signals, such as analog, SD, HD, 3G, HDMI and IP [MPEG-2, H.264 and JPEG2000], on a single display,” he said. “For customers moving towards an all-IP or UHD facility in the future, our newest platform 3067VIP series is ready for it.”

The 3067VIP series platform monitors SMPTE RDD 37 (ASPEN), VSF TR03, SMPTE 2022-6, JPEG2000, in addition to traditional HD/3G-SDI input or via XLINK technology.

“With 4K, 12G, HDR and different IP formats, multiviewers need to be flexible to support future customer needs,” Patel said.

In the two years since Evertz introduced the 3067VIP, Patel said that it’s been installed in more than 50 OB trucks and broadcast facilities worldwide. Generation operational management and orchestration platform.

Consistent with Imagine's mission to facilitate a seamless transition to an all-IP future, EPIC MV is a hybrid SDI/IP solution that’s also UHD ready. It supports SMPTE 2022- 6 and 2022-7 standards for video over IP, and SMPTE 2022-2 for compressed delivery over IP, with other new standards being added as they’re adopted.

Imagine’s Zenium workflow management platform provides the framework for the software-based, UHD-ready IP multiviewer, according to Robert Millis, senior product manager for Imagine Communications. “With Zenium, we have a growing suite of software components capable of doing innovative processing tasks, from unwrapping and decoding different formats, to video processing and presentation,” he said. “When higher performance is needed, Zenium easily allows you to add hardware acceleration to optimize demanding workflows. Zenium also provides the infrastructure to scale EPIC MV across many hardware nodes, providing a solution for any size monitoring need.”

EPIC MV was designed for high-value live production, including challenging mobile environments, where the rigors of travel and event setup come into play. Its rich toolset lets users dynamically change the views on the monitor walls. And it minimizes noise emission, with efficient power consumption.

While EPIC MV helps facilitate the transition from SDI to IP with UHD display support, Millis said, “it still offers HD/SD-3G support over BNC and baseband, hooks to legacy interfaces, and handles today’s standards and formats, all on the same framework.”

Grass Valley’s KMX-4911 Kaleido Multiviewer, which enables customers to input, monitor and output a wide range of HD and SD formats as well as new standards. Each KMX-4911 card fits into a slot on the GV Node frame, Grass Valley’s flagship real-time IP processing and routing platform.STRONG IP BACKBONE
Grass Valley recently launched the KMX- 4911 Kaleido Multiviewer, which enables customers to input, monitor and output a wide range of HD and SD formats as well as new standards, such as SMPTE 2022-6, TICO compression for 4K UHD over IP, and 4K inputs paired with 4K UHD display outputs for live productions.

Each KMX-4911 card fits into a slot on the GV Node frame, Grass Valley’s flagship real-time IP processing and routing platform. While GV Node itself supports frame-accurate Densité signal processing and routing across the broadcast workflow, the KMX- 4911 cards specifically add Kaleido multiviewing of all major SD and HD formats, input of IP signals, as well as monitoring of 4K UHD sources on a 4K display.

Since GV Node is modular, “it can be reconfigured by adding or swapping cards, making it easy for users to integrate and display the video formats their facilities need now and in the future for live production, playout, and master control, mobile broadcast or other applications,” said Martin Jolicoeur, multiviewer product manager for Grass Valley. Each GV Node frame includes 12 built-in 40 GigE ports, and each KMX- 4911 module scales from 9–36 inputs and from one to four outputs.

“At its core, our GV Node has an IP infrastructure capable of accurate, deterministic switching,” Jolicoeur said. “In large multiviewer installations of about 20 or more displays, this IP core optimizes performance and saves money by eliminating costly, complex cabling between the router and multiviewer.”

Lawo’s “theWall” software provides a touchscreen-optimized HTML5 GUI, allowing easy multiviewer set-up using the browser of any device, such as an iPad.INTERACTIVE SET-UP
Lawo, a German-based provider of IP technology for media enterprises, has developed an intuitive, interactive application that simplifies set-up and control of multiviewers and monitor walls, including routing signals, changing mosaic layouts or saving and loading user presets. While today’s multiviewers have complex software configuration panels, Lawo’s “theWall” software provides a touchscreen-optimized HTML5 GUI, allowing easy multiviewer set-up using the browser of any device, such as an iPad.

Based on touchscreen input, theWall acts as a go-between, sending whatever technical commands are needed to configure the desired display. The user experience remains consistent regardless of the multiviewer’s brand, size or features, and users are no longer dependent upon others with specialized expertise. theWall supports Imagine and Cobalt multiviewers; control of Evertz, Grass Valley and other brands is in development.

“theWall is especially beneficial on OB trucks, where freelancers, such as TDs or producers, want to custom-tailor monitor walls for live shows,” said Erling Hedkvist, senior vice president, Americas for Lawo. “This request typically requires the engineer-in-charge—often the busiest person on the truck compound— to spend valuable time configuring the multiviewer, or the crew must settle for a preconfigured layout that’s not ideal for their show.”

This affordable IP-driven control system also benefits busy studios, where different shows are produced back to back. Users can easily store setups to return any multiviewer to preferred settings.

“With theWall, any production team member can achieve more pleasing, creative display configurations and workflows on their own than would otherwise be possible,” Hedkvist said. theWall, which Lawo acquired from NEP, is part of Lawo’s VSM vendor independent control and monitoring platform, which controls a multitude of routers, switchers, graphics systems and other devices into one unified workflow.

Cobalt Digital offers the 9970-QS openGear card form factor and BBG-1070- QS standalone multiviewers for traditional broadcast and broadcast, according to Bob McAlpine, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Cobalt. “The combination of Cobalt’s award-winning signal monitoring and image processing knowledge, along with the density of the 9970-QS openGear card and flexibility of the BBG-1000 have proven to be tough to beat,” he said.

The 3G/HD/SD/SD-SDI/CVBS 5 Input “quint-split” display processors offer five auto-detect inputs to one display and use a cascading system architecture when more source images are required on a display. Some new enhancements include Dashboard control GUI optimizations that make setting up even a large cascade system an easy task, as well as the ability to capture full 1080p still images of the multiviewer output for remote viewing over IP in DashBoard of Web-GUI.

PORTLAND, ORE.—Apantac, an openGear partner and provider of multiviewers, video walls, extenders and signal processing technology, plans to showcase multiple of its 4K systems at CCW 2015.

T#

One of the products on display will be the T# 4K capable multiviewer. Available in three sizes—1RU, 2RU and 4RU—with 16 pre-configured models that can also be expanded with additional input or outputs boards. Each board is interchangeable between all three frame sizes. The T# can also support JPEG2000, SMPTE-2022-6, H.264 and HDMI.

Apantac’s OG-MiniQ four input multiviewer will also be on display. Designed for the openGear platform, the OG-MiniQ offers four auto-detect 3G/HD/SD-SDI inputs and supports up to 10 modules for up to 40 inputs on a single openGear frame. It also supports 4K inputs and outputs.

Apantac will also show a pair of converters at CCW, the Micro-4K-DP and Micro-4K Down converter. The Micro-4K-DP is a true 4K/HD monitoring converter that supports 4K 60Hz at 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 with Displayport 1.2 output. Available as a standalone and card system for openGear, the Micro-4K Down converter down-converts professional 4K/UHD signals to HD for supporting 4K on both HD and HDMI devices.

More info on Apantac’s products can be found at its booth, 1435. CCW runs from Nov. 11-12 in New York. For more information, visit www.ccwexpo.com. 

At this year’s NAB Show, Apantac introduced its T# multiviewer, which features a “virtual-matrix”- type operation.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Remote production presents added challenges, especially where space is often at premium. Outside of the master control environment, whether on a truck or at remote facility, issues such as power consumption, heat and access to devices need to be overcome. In these situations multiviewers need to be compact yet still offer specific features for today’s increasingly demanding clients.

“Video and audio monitoring has never been more challenging due to the need to deliver increasingly large quantities of content in multiple formats, on multiple devices, at any given time,” said Martin Jolicoeur, product manager for Grass Valley. “In the truck environment, multiviewers have replaced the walls of CRT displays with flat panel monitors. This has reduced the weight and power consumption, which are two important factors to consider in trucks.”

Moreover multiviewers need to be able to tackle the different requirements presented by truck owners.

“Some want to use four displays and split these, and that is very different from a fixed MC with many sources on the same screen,” added Jolicoeur. “One other challenge of mobile production remains that everything may have to be laid out for each specific event, and needs to be reconfigured on the fly. Multiviewers give the production team the ability to do this.”

INCREASED OPPORTUNITIES
Despite such challenges, remote production is a growing market for next generation multiviewers.

“We have a big play already in the live and remote production market,” said Robert Millis, senior product manager of measurement and monitoring products at Imagine Communications in Dallas. “That is a big market, but one with big challenges as it often involves interfacing with a lot of third party platforms.”

The multiviewers used in these remote productions must be able to help the users isolate streams as issues occur, while allowing the engineer to address any issues while the rest of the channels “just tick along,” according to Millis.

Multiviewers are also adding new ways for content creators to increase revenue streams, as the various content feeds can be sent out to other channels or used in alternative delivery methods such as webbased content.

“Multiviewing can also be a way to increase the opportunities to monetize and distribute the content,” Millis suggested. “People crave the experience they are getting from a multiview product.”

SIZE STILL MATTERS

TNDV’s Aspiration mobile production unit includes an Imagine Communications multiviewer.
With space at a premium, every device that is crammed into remote truck rack space has to be smaller and lighter and produce less heat. The result has been a split in the types of mutliviewers that are being introduced to the industry.

On the one end of the spectrum there has been an influx of low-end products that fill the need of “if you can see it is plenty good.”

However, at the other end of the spectrum are the high-end products that offer advanced features including color comparison, embedded audio and greater resolution that allows for greater splits on a display.

“We’re seeing a lot of trucks utilizing 55-inch panels that have a number of quad splits,” said Thomas Tang, president of Apantac, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of multiviewer systems. The company has introduced a multiviewer that allows a single input to be replicated multiple times. The Cascadable Quad-Split: OG-MiniQ offers low power consumption of just 15W, can handle 40 inputs on a single openGear frame and features simultaneous HDMI/DVI and SDI outputs.

At this year’s NAB Show, Apantac introduced its T# multiviewer, which features a “virtual-matrix”-type operation. Size across the platform is still one of the biggest considerations. “For trucks the multiviewer needs to be smaller, cooler and use less energy,” he said.

At the same time, the multiviewer can provide a plethora of images on today’s flat panel displays, and because each image is reduced in size there is now an added benefit, according to Tang. “The resolution is actually much better on a smaller monitor,” he said. “The nature of the technology is just that way.”

4K AND IP

While space in a truck may be limited, larger 4K panels may actually solve some of the inherent problems because fewer panels may be needed. This is one of the two main technology drivers in the multiviewer space today.

“With the advent of these large flat screens that can be 85-inches or more it simply doesn’t make sense to have multiple CRT monitors,” said Alan Smith, product manager at Quantel Snell. “It gives you total flexibility, plus, if you are producing in 4K, you want to be able to monitor in 4K.”

The move to 4K/UHD could also lead the way to new interfaces between devices including the multiviewer.

“4K is providing better resolution and color depth,” noted Millis. “There will also be a bigger canvas as well, but we’re seeing integration of the consumer interfaces including Display Port 1.2 and HDMI 4.0. 4K/UHD, which will be more closely wired between the multiviewer and the end display.”

While the mobile environment is still primarily baseband, a steady shift to IP can address issues of scalability while also ensuring that content can be delivered for on-air broadcast as well as streaming end-products via the Web or to mobile devices.

To accommodate the ever-changing requirements presented by IP, Glass Valley has introduced what it has dubbed the industry’s first “Glass-to-Glass” IP solution, which offers video-over-IP connectivity (SMPTE 2022-6), spanning cameras, routing, gateways, plus control and monitoring.

“In mobile production the environment is still baseband centric,” said Jolicoeur. “IP is starting to happen in mobile and at NAB we introduced an IP flavor to our ‘Glass-to-Glass’ solution for use in trucks.”

The use of IP for multiviewers has “massive potential for the future,” said Quantel Snell’s Smith. “This is something we have been working on with our multiviewers. We are looking at IP routing and how the multiviewerstory will tie in with that in the mobile/truck space.”