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.”
