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

Content Matching

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

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

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

Integration of Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM)

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

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

TAG Bridge

TAG Bridge solves two major problems. It helps reduce the bandwidth needed to deliver uncompressed video from the receiving device to a remote location for multiview generations, and it eliminates the need to process the same source multiple times.

This technology is designed to handle various transport methods, such as 2110 uncompressed video or compressed MPEG TS streams, and many others.

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

Managing HDR in Live Broadcasting

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

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

Zero Friction® Licensing

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

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

As OTT (Over-The-Top) technology has gotten more mature and established robust standards over the years, the concept of OTT monitoring is gaining popularity. With customer expectations soaring, it’s vital for OTT providers to deliver superior-quality content. To deliver Quality of Experience (QoE) on par with linear TV broadcast, the entire system, starting from ingest to multi-bitrate encoding to delivery to CDN must be monitored continuously.

Streaming service providers and broadcasters understand the complexities involved in OTT delivery and the media distribution chain—from content acquisition to actual transmission. OTT monitoring primarily involves monitoring the status of all key elements in the pipeline starting with the media source, encoders, decoders, output of Content Distribution Network (CDN), etc. The amount of media consumed over OTT is growing at a staggering pace, and people’s viewing habits are rapidly moving towards a unified multiscreen experience. These rapid changes demand a strong comprehensive monitoring solution that takes care of all the aspects in the OTT chain and makes it easy for people at various levels in broadcast operations to monitor and control the entire system.

The primary goals of monitoring OTT are to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE) and compliance monitoring. These quality metrics include media quality for confidence monitoring and delivery of captions, both for primary and secondary languages, to increase user engagement. In addition to QoS and QoE monitoring, broadcasters have another challenge to track viewership using ID3 Tag technology.

A comprehensive monitoring system includes the following:

• Encoder status, start/stop streaming, alarms, etc. It is essential to ensure proper encoding of content that comes in from multiple sources. As opposed to traditional broadcasts, live cloud OTT workflows are much more complex as it involves delivery to individual devices with multiple profiles. It is critical to monitor for all possible issues like frame misalignment, syntax errors, over-compression, absence of markers & metadata, dropped packets, and compliance slips as these issues can negatively impact a positive viewer experience. A monitoring system should be able to monitor end-to-end workflow, raise alarms, report streaming status, and notify issues that occur anywhere in the end-to-end system. This helps to quickly resolve issues before the end customers get affected.

• CDN status (concurrent connections, origin, visitors’ statistics, etc.) The CDN plays a crucial part in delivering content to end customers. It is critical to monitor the origin of the content, viewers’ statistics, and CDN edge.

• RTMP Surveillance and analysis of local encoders' output

• External report on streaming services availability at CDN outputs, ping, etc.

• Monitoring of website accessibility, CDN status, network status, etc.

• Video-on-Demand accessibility and Quality Control Analysis. In addition to live streaming, VOD clips must be monitored for quality.

• End-user experience status report

• End-user experience report for developers

• Server-Side Ad Insertion

• Captions

OTT Monitoring Advances

OTT monitoring is evolving at a rapid pace. Early on, OTT monitoring had largely been limited to IT infrastructure monitoring, and to some extent, monitoring streams at edge locations as a proof of delivery.

With the market growing, more and more OTT broadcasters are starting to see the value of monitoring. Efforts are on to converge OTT platforms and optimize streaming protocols.

OTT providers use various streaming protocols for media delivery, including Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Real-time Transport Protocol, Smoothing Streaming, etc. Often, the receiving devices support only one or two protocols requiring service providers to stream their content in multiple protocols. Nowadays, the media streaming process is largely being performed in the cloud, making use of the CDN. The data that goes in and is delivered out from the CDN needs to be monitored to guarantee QoE.

Also, transmission errors can occur while transporting media data using the IP network; errors could pertain to packet latency, jitter, packet loss, etc. This makes it important for service providers to introduce complete quality monitoring solutions, including video monitoring at the CDN data centers and at the edge locations.

Cloud-based monitoring is extremely efficient as it works like a virtual machine (VM) that can be moved to any place within a particular network. This makes it easier to store, manage and process data, thereby saving a lot of time, effort, and money. Cloud-based monitoring allows monitoring in geo-restricted streams and regions as well as scaling up monitoring, particularly with server-side ad insertions.

The State of Logging and Compliance

Logging and compliance of traditional broadcasts are being done by a lot of companies. However, these types of loggings neither cover OTT content nor do they cover content that has advertisements inserted at the MSO. Relying on logs to understand what happens to the content could turn out to be wrong.

OTT operations have changed the way that advertisements are delivered; they can specify ads for a specific market or a community. However, these broadcasts generally are poorly monitored, or at times not monitored at all compared to traditional broadcasts.

Thus far, there has been no major push from the industry to monitor OTT due to minimal FCC compliance requirements and a lack of an industry standard on OTT. Rapid innovations are being made in OTT and broadcast video delivery. Content owners are under constant pressure to respond to the surge in OTT content consumption.

OTT video service delivery technique is making use of dynamic adaptive video streaming over HTTP (DASH). Over the past year, MPEG-DASH has seen rapid growth and has also gained strong ground in OTT technologies.

The ATSC 3.0 specification is making use of DASH for Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband TV. ATSC 3.0 offers broadcasters the opportunity to deliver broadcast and broadband services to provide better a television experience.

Statistical multiplexing (Statmux) helps in providing high-quality ATSC 3.0 streams and facilitates efficient use of available bandwidth and supports to optimize bitrates and video quality of channels that share the same physical layer pipes. OTT content travels via a broadband connection in the receiver and DASH acts as the enabler in this scenario.

OTT Monitoring Best Practices

According to the image above, the entire OTT video delivery process is carried out in three different layers. The three OTT Layers: Operations Layer, Media Layer, and Distribution Layer are monitored by three groups of API Integration. These API integrations monitor content throughout the workflow right from content acquisition to content consumption to content delivery. Monitoring includes minute observations for all touch points of the workflow and provides all the technical error data, which works as an alarm, and helps provide users uninterrupted video.

The key to improving operational efficiency is to create a fault-tolerant OTT streaming infrastructure. In case of an eventual fault, reducing the resolution time to minimum is fundamental. As highlighted in the diagram above, a comprehensive and easy- to-use dashboard that captures and controls the health of the entire infrastructure real-time can add value to the overall operation.

Current Cloud-based Challenges

• Multiple protocols being used to support a wide range of devices OTT providers use multiple streaming protocols for media delivery, and the receiving devices support only one or two protocols, which prompts OTT service providers to stream their content in multiple protocols. The data that goes in and comes out from the CDN needs to be monitored to guarantee the quality of experience (QoE).

• Last mile monitoring cloud-based OTT monitoring must handle the problem of last mile monitoring. Cloud-based applications must be monitored at various levels including user experience. Physically, there is a considerable distance between where the application is running and where the users are. Conventional monitoring, being part of the application environment, makes it technically difficult to monitor how an application behaves at the user’s end—be it a mobile app or a web browser. Internet issues specific to each region are to be monitored. Bad internet connectivity could impact user experience. 

Multiple multi-bitrate results in an increased resource requirement. Another major challenge of OTT content streaming is that the devices and networks are far more diverse than those assembled in controlled environments like satellite, cable, etc. An adaptable architecture is necessary to address the varied needs of network conditions and device requirements.

Streaming videos are being delivered to a range of devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets, making the monitoring process more complex. Bitrates and profiles with which each variant is encoded are different. So, from a monitoring and quality control perspective, operators need to put in more efforts as they have many versions for each piece of content.

Networks used by some of the devices need to tolerate dynamically fluctuating characteristics. Also, the underlying technology used in adaptive bitrate streaming is not standardized.

The aforementioned are not specific to all cloud-based applications, but to OTT monitoring in general.

Future OTT Monitoring Fixes:

• Simulating last mile bandwidth variations
• Convergence of protocols
• Limiting the number of manifests and reducing error rates while switching from one manifest to another

Future Advances in Cloud-based Monitoring of OTT Content

• Converging of streaming protocols, a widely adapted industry standard; MPEG-DASH for instance
• A protocol based on segmented delivery with near zero latency
• Advances in video compression, partly promised by H265 and efficient utilization of available bandwidth for best QoS

Hiren Hindocha is the CEO of Digital Nirvana.