HINTERSCHMIDING and MUNICH, Germany—At MMO Managed Media Operations, our teams manage cloud-native live production and playout infrastructure across Europe. We specialize in stream ingest, signal monitoring and multiviewing for broadcast customers, handling everything from linear channels to event-based live coverage. Our workflows are built entirely in Amazon Web Services (AWS), using TAG’s platform across multiple use cases from signal acquisition to visual QC.
Our Business Needs
Our biggest challenge is maintaining signal quality and availability at scale without introducing operational complexity. We ingest dozens of contribution feeds from multiple customers (delivered via SRT) and monitor signal health throughout each signal’s life cycle, from preprocessing and metadata injection through packaging and final distribution.
In a cloud-native environment, we needed a solution that supports dynamic scaling, provides granular probing and alerting and enables real-time response. Our major pain point: the time-to-resolution when something goes wrong. We can’t afford to spend minutes determining if a problem is upstream, inside our infrastructure or downstream at the handoff point.
For deployment, we use TAG’s Realtime Monitoring Platform to monitor incoming and outgoing SRT contribution streams, plus intermediate handoffs, metadata overlays and packaging status. Everything is deployed 100% in the cloud, containerized and fully orchestrated in AWS.
TAG provides a unified view of signal health at every critical point. We can ingest contribution feeds, decode and display multiviewers for operational staff and create mosaic views for stakeholders across different functions. TAG’s open APIs integrate with our tools, and our infrastructure-as-code approach means TAG can be spun up or down quickly as needed.
In terms of use cases, we primarily support 24/7 playout and live-event ingest for multiple European broadcast customers. Our signal-acquisition team monitors all incoming SRT streams using TAG, with alerting tied to key thresholds (loss, jitter, decode errors). We can also visualize packaging and encoding stages downstream, ensuring signals are clean and synchronized before handoff.
More specifically, we get the signals via SRT from several customers, then send them to a partner that does distribution or playout. For one broadcaster, we created a special layout, the customer could connect from their side to TAG, and they could view it on their own.
TAG’s SRT support and ability to decode and visualize mosaic views in the same environment are key strengths. We leverage TAG’s layout editor to quickly create custom displays for different departments and events, from election night coverage to regional sports.
Operational Impact
Since deploying TAG, we’ve reduced time-to-visualize issues from several minutes to under 30 seconds. Operators rely on TAG’s mosaic displays to identify stream issues in real time and take immediate action. Our engineers appreciate the detailed metrics, which pinpoint whether issues stem from ingest, transcoding or handoff. Because everybody on the team is remote, it was important that it’s cloud-native. TAG helps us go deeper into the error and zoom into the signal.
TAG enables us to offer higher confidence and SLAs or standard-level agreements to broadcast customers. When a customer asks whether their feed is live and stable, we don’t jump between dashboards. We open TAG and see everything at a glance.
As for next steps, we plan to expand TAG’s footprint into more event-based workflows and integrate its data into our monitoring and ticketing systems. We’re also exploring deeper integration with scheduling metadata to automatically trigger layout changes based on time of day or event priority.
In short, TAG has become critical to our live operations and engineering workflows. It delivers confidence, speed and flexibility across highly dynamic cloud-native production environments. Most importantly, it allows us to focus on managing signals, not managing tools.
For more information, visit tagvs.com.
