By rssfeeds-admin 
Broadcast compliance and monitoring vendors have upgraded their offerings, adding dynamic multiviewers as well as support for 3.0, OTT and FAST channels. Some provide quality-of-experience monitoring for what their OTT product looks like after it has been delivered over the internet to a connected TV. Networking vendors have also gotten into the monitoring game, providing end-to-end visibility of how streaming content is performing across IP networks. And transmission suppliers are now providing remote monitoring of over-the-air transmitters as part of a turnkey service to large broadcast customers who are shy on RF engineering talent.
Many Kinds Of Monitoring
Monitoring can mean various things in a broadcast plant, notes John Mailhot, SVP of product management for Imagine Communications. Multiviewers are a great tool for master control operators responsible for keeping channels on air and quickly restoring them in case of signal problems. Meanwhile, more complex monitoring tools that log minor alarms and faults are relied on by engineers to troubleshoot equipment problems and perform maintenance before a significant failure.
“You really have to think about monitoring as each function within an organization needs to make decisions,” Mailhot says. “Monitoring is about different things in different parts of the facility.”
Australian firm Mediaproxy initially built its business on compliance, recording and logging broadcast feeds to make sure that stations were meeting all regulatory requirements such as loudness and closed captioning. Over 25 years it has evolved into providing an array of software-based monitoring tools, including a dynamic IP multiviewer, Monwall, that can display live streams of both broadcast and OTT programming as well as associated metadata.
While compliance is very important and needs to be reliable, says Mediaproxy CEO Erik Otto, it is not that interesting. He compares it to insurance, in that you don’t think about it much until you need it.
“Monitoring, of course, is far more interesting,” Otto says. “Everyone wants to be better at a lower cost, wants to know things about all the different formats, all the different types of sources, and they want to make sure they can reduce cost at the same quality. It’s as simple as that.”
ATSC 3.0 And OTT Monitoring
A new format many local broadcasters are now dealing with is ATSC 3.0, and Mediaproxy has made a significant investment to create 3.0 versions of its ATSC 1.0 monitoring and compliance tools. Customers are used to having a standard set-top box with a demodulator on the other end to be able to monitor their off-air signals, and Mediaproxy wanted to support similar operations in 3.0.
Mediaproxy spent over a year creating a software-based decryption engine that works with the Google Widevine encryption technology selected by ATSC. It allows 3.0 customers to access all the things they’re used to with 1.0 monitoring, including audio, video, ancillary packets, private metadata and watermarks.
The company has been working to support monitoring of OTT streams for much longer, which comes with its own unique challenges. Broadcasters who are delivering content to YouTube or to connected TV platforms like Roku or Apple TV and want visibility into those feeds don’t have an obvious solution.
“They don’t really have an easy way to monitor the return path, because there is technically no return path,” Otto says. “You’re now in civilian land.”
Some broadcasters have solved the visibility problem by taking the HDMI output of a Roku or Apple TV box and converting it so a broadcast system like Mediaproxy can deal with it. But Otto says OTT formats don’t always convert easily to SDI depending on their frame rates and sometimes require the use of an additional standards converter. Others have “scraped” the screen by logging into YouTube on a computer and then outputting the monitor. These methods can work, but they “aren’t nice,” Otto says. So Mediaproxy has figured out a way to get HTML directly into its system.
“Now we’ve found a solution that you can actually take that standard civilian YouTube URL, and we can deal with it directly in our multiviewer and directly as an input as well,” Otto says.
Mediaproxy has also upgraded its multiviewer with interactive capabilities that allow an operator to go beyond the traditional passive mosaic and use their mouse to click on a panel and quickly assess problems indicated in an exception-based monitoring scheme. The multiviewer can also display test and measurement data in addition to video, such as visualizing the output of a transport stream analyzer.
“You can have an exception-based panel where you just see boxes that say V for video errors and A for audio errors, and things like that, and they go red,” Otto says. “But then you can hover your mouse over it and you can click on it. You can then turn the audio on, or you can then render the picture on demand, which is sort of like an on-demand penalty box. And that makes it a lot more efficient.”
New Owners For Actus Digital
Another compliance and monitoring vendor offering end-to-end monitoring of broadcast and OTT streams is Actus Digital, which was acquired this month by IP transmission specialist LiveU but will continue to operate as its own brand. The company showed the tenth generation of its “intelligent monitoring platform,” Actus X, at the NAB Show in April.
Actus X encompasses six different products that can be turned on or off as software options including a broadcast compliance logger; OTT monitoring; an interactive multiviewer; post-set-top box remote video monitoring for MVPDs; technical monitoring and alerting; clipping, editing and publishing; and automatic ad detection.
LiveU and Actus Digital share many of the same customers, including several large U.S. station groups, says Actus Digital CEO Sima Levy. She says the LiveU acquisition addresses big broadcasters’ desire to deal with fewer vendors overall.
“Broadcasters want a one-stop shop,” Levy says. “They want to deal with less vendors and get more solutions from less vendors. They don’t want one system from here, one system from there.”
Ken Rubin, SVP, Americas for Actus Digital, says the LiveU investment will allow Actus Digital, which supports hybrid and cloud operation but mostly runs on on-prem compute at its customers’ plants, to continue research and development on new cloud-based workflows.
Rubin says that 80% of Actus Digital’s business continues to be “quality assurance and compliance type of sales,” but that it has been making progress recently with multiviewer-only sales.
“The combination and the way that they overlap has some really great synergies,” Rubin says. “For the first time, people are looking at do I really need to spend money on the traditional multiviewer, because the Actus multiviewer is doing everything they used to do.”
Rubin says there have been advancements with lower latency. “One of the nice things that we’ve done recently is the combination of all the different types of probe points and feeds they might want to monitor,” he says. “Not just SDI, but ATSC 3.0 returns, ATSC [1.0] returns, HDMI inputs from a set-top box, all their OTT, all of those come into the Actus system now.”
The fastest growth is in OTT, particularly the 24/7 FAST linear channels being created by broadcasters. Actus Digital has developed the capability over the past year to probe those FAST channels, which Rubin calls the “fourth monitoring point.”
“Not the source feed, not after it’s been mixed in the transmission feed, and not even the transmission return,” Rubin says, “but the return from those apps and devices like Fire [TV] Stick and Roku and LG and Samsung TVs. He says those fourth probe points were more difficult in the past for to be able to monitor. Now, he says Actus has the entire flow and chain, including OTT side by side with over the air transmissions, “and it’s a nice combined tool for stations who are continued to ask to do more with less.”
Riding 2110 Growth
Monitoring and probing specialist TAG Video Systems is best known for its IP-based multiviewers, which are used in large master control facilities as well as mobile production trucks. While TAG has experienced a surge in the number of OTT streams it handles over the past few years, the biggest current trend the company currently sees is a steady migration on the production side from SDI to an ST 2110 IP-based routing infrastructure, says Michael Demb, TAG VP of product strategy.
“If we look at the previous years, we went from just early adopters of the 2110 technology to people starting to get into the game, and then move a lot of production into 2110, slowly replacing legacy SDI environments,” Demb says. “This year, it’s probably where we’re reaching about 50% of market for 2110.”
TAG’s back-end software architecture has allowed it to continually add new features and functionalities to its core monitoring platform. This spring, it expanded its “Realtime Media Platform” to include a new live video quality control tool, QC Station, which enables engineers to monitor, validate and troubleshoot video content directly within TAG’s Media Control System (MCS). Capabilities include luminance, chrominance and HDR content validation.
“We’re basically providing waveform and vectorscopes and other tools that, otherwise you would need part of a box to sit somewhere in the office and do those things,” Demb says.
He notes as people move HDR workflows and another complicated workflows into the cloud, they need the same tools that they’re used to. “We put it into the product, and they can do that in the cloud or remote locations,” he says. “And we have customers who are going to deploy it across multiple remote sites and just use it in a central monitoring location. That’s something you couldn’t do without being 100% software.”
Demb emphasizes that TAG’s software-centric approach allows it to easily handle a variety of different formats, such as viewing the uncompressed feed from a production truck and the compressed version of the same programming, which may be going to a CDN for OTT distribution, in the same multiviewer wall.
“He says with the set of QC Tools that TAG just introduced, it can generate a digitally accurate test pattern all the way from the 2110 source. It can then take that source and compare it to the same video stream on the compressed side, and even the OTT side.
That allows users to generate the test pattern with the exact colors where they know what their value should be of that color and ensure that all the equipment that touches that stream all the way down to the consumer is not changing the color as it should be.
“You want the red to look red and the blue to be blue and the white to be white, so you can verify that it’s exact same look and feel on the OTT side,” Demb says. “And that is done in one single product, something that is not possible with just SDI.”
More Multiviewer Options
Several vendors demonstrated new or updated software-based multiviewers designed to work with 2110 production architectures at this year’s NAB Show.
Lawo introduced a “HOME Intelligent Multiviewer” based on its server-based processing platform for on-prem and cloud production. The system minimizes bandwidth and CPU usage as it dynamically allocates processing power based on the multiviewer job at hand. Paired with its .edge SDI-to-IP gateway and edge processing solution, the HOME Intelligent Multiviewer minimizes bandwidth and CPU usage by intelligently selecting optimal downsized video proxies for its mosaic layouts.
The number of PiPs in the Home Multiviewer can easily be adapted to changing requirements, going from one to up to 64 splits by simply setting the relevant parameter in the HOME GUI. The NAB demo showed the Home Multiviewer changing from a master control room (MCR) configuration to a production control room configuration (PCR) and then to an audio control room, each with a different arrangement of PIPs, using Lawo’s VSM control system.
Lawo Senior Product Manager John Carter says the key feature of the new Home Multiviewer is a “dynamic receiver” that can deal with a variety of formats including uncompressed 2110, JPEG-XS and even NDI. It can also handle a mix of SDR and HDR signals and perform cross-conversion where necessary.
“What we want to offer the customers is a flexible choice,” Clark says. That means they can have a classic multiviewer, or what Lawo has done with the dynamic receiver is have an intelligent multiviewer, which it calls the IMV.
Clark says within the multiviewer now is it is resolution- and color space-aware. When it has a PIP or tile a certain size, it knows the resolution. And he notes with the proxy workflow it has in the intelligent multiviewer, “its control system says, ‘OK, that’s the size of your resolution. I will send to you the necessary proxy, be a quarter of a UHD or a 16th, to save network bandwidth and actually keep the efficiency of the compute in place.’”
Signal-processing specialist Cobalt Digital introduced several upgrades to its UltraBlue IP-MV Multiviewer, a software-based multiviewer for compressed and baseband streams over IP that the company also sells as a turnkey server.
New features for the UltraBlue IP-MV include support for receiving audio/video content over IP across a variety of protocols and formats, including compressed and baseband (2110 or SDI) inputs, with multiple outputs and flexible audio routing. Using an intuitive web interface, the multiviewer’s mosaic can be quickly configured with arbitrary sizes and orientations, graphic overlays, ancillary data, tallies, UMDs (User Mnemonic Displays) and IDs. PIPs can be arbitrarily placed and rotated, PIP configurations can be easily copied, and setups can be saved and restored.
UltraBlue IP-MV will also drive multiple HDMI displays in any orientation (landscape or portrait, selectable per-display), and incorporates support for the most common types of ancillary data including various types of closed-captioning. It also features full audio support with flexible output audio routing and fully configurable audio bars.
Cobalt has been seeing strong growth in the Pro AV market with limited growth in traditional broadcast, says Suzana Brady, SVP of worldwide sales and marketing for Cobalt Digital. In addition to including both SDI and 2110 capability in its products, the company is also supporting IPMX, a set of IP networking standards for the Pro AV market based on ST 2110, as well as HDMI where appropriate.
“Our multiviewer supports SDI in, we have a compression flavor and we also have a 2110 flavor, all in one,” Brady says. “It’s software-based, which some people wanted. But we also sell the turnkey with the hardware, while the competition does not. We’re trying to be more versatile.”
German processing software specialist Manifold demonstrated its “Cloud Multiviewer” working with 2110 hardware from its sister company Arkona Technologies. The two companies market together an “Easy-IP” solution for transitioning from SDI to 2110. Arkona handles signal transport through its Blade/runner AT300 gateway, while Manifold provides ultra-low-latency multiviewer functionality and other signal processing through its Cloud software, which runs on COTS hardware.
Arkona uses FPGA acceleration cards in a cluster to share the work of creating multiviewers or doing cross-conversion, says Arkona Research & Development Engineer Jonas Reucher. Every 2110 input that hits the system is only processed once. Once a 2110 input is routed into the system, it is assigned it to an accelerator which then creates multiple resolution levels from this. And on the output side for the Manifold multiviewer, the system figures out what resolution it needs to put on the network.
While the system can theoretically create up to 512 PIPs for a multiview mosaic, that is too small for a human being to see anything relevant. Reucher says 64 or 80 PIPs is the maximum he’s seen.
“The nice thing here is you don’t have to decide what resolution level it should use, it always does it by itself,” Reucher says. “With PiPs small like this, it’s just going to take the next highest resolution level from that resolution, and then on the output just downscale it, so that you never lose quality in the picture. So, cross-scaling on the input, and then fine-grain downscaling on the output, and this way pretty much any amount of PIPs can be shown per [multiviewer] head. It doesn’t matter if it’s UHD or 3G [1080p] coming in, because the output always only takes what it needs.”
Rooting Out IP Problems
Network switch giant Cisco, which is one of the biggest players in broadcast 2110 infrastructure, has also entered the monitoring game with its “ThousandEyes” product.
ThousandEyes is what Cisco calls an “observability platform” that can track IP signals from source to destination, whether they are simply traveling through on-prem IP infrastructure or through the public internet. It is becoming increasingly valuable with the growing amount of high value content, including live sports, being delivered over-the-top by broadcasters, says Chris Lapp, technical solutions architect for the media and entertainment vertical in the Americas at Cisco.
“We monitor video and IP protocols at the network level and in our on-prem infrastructure, but with ThousandEyes, we can specifically target the viewer experience all the way to the house,” Lapp says. “Our ThousandEyes agents are deployed all across other people’s infrastructure — think AWS, think Google, think any network along the way that you might go to. We can actually monitor the experience of Netflix, Peacock or Amazon Prime all the way to the user’s house.”
A ThousandEyes agent is a piece of software running on a Linux virtual machine. It runs on Cisco routers and switches but can also run on a simple “raspberry pie” Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) or any other small appliance that can run Linux.
If there is a large outage with streaming in a specific region, ThousandEyes can do synthetic testing and discern exactly why that is, Lapp notes.
“It can see every hop,” he says. “Maybe it’s a DNS issue, maybe it’s a BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) peering problem or maybe the streams just aren’t making it out of your facility. But ThousandEyes can actually monitor that. Think your traditional broadcast monitoring, but very tailored towards the newer types of viewership in that sense. We can actually see all the way to the user.”
Watching Over Transmitters
Transmitter manufacturers are addressing shifts in engineering staff among their broadcast customers by now offering full-time remote monitoring of their transmitters as part of their service options.
GatesAir used NAB 2025 to launch “AirWatch 365,” which builds on the company’s existing “GatesAir Care” preventative maintenance services by providing new 24/7 NOC-based remote monitoring from its Quincy, Ill. manufacturing center. There, a dedicated team of GatesAir RF experts will monitor transmitter performance, analyze RF conditions and proactively respond to issues that affect quality of experience and uptime, including performing remote software updates and even traveling to the transmitter site to effect repairs.
GatesAir VP of Technology Ray Miklius says the new “AirWatch 365” product is aimed squarely at the void in RF engineering expertise that exists across many stations as older engineers retire.
“We’ve been asked over and over again — our customers just can’t find over-the-air RF talent to monitor and maintain their existing RF plants,” Miklius says. “We’re trying to hopefully offset some of that labor cost and then let them take advantage of our 500 man-years of experience in our service group.”
GatesAir has developed a master user interface that its RF engineers will use to monitor transmitter performance across a station or a group. Customers will eventually get access to the same UI to help them stay apprised of their transmitters’ performance.
The AirWatch 365 system will also constantly pull performance data from each transmitter — some 62,000 data points a second — that will be fed into an AI engine for long-term performance analysis.
“We’re trying to develop some predictive analysis tools so we can predict what may fail and perhaps even contact the customer to deploy parts,” Miklius says.
The remote monitoring model is already established with some large transmission providers in Europe, and GatesAir has modeled its approach after them. The company already has a similar monitoring operation up and running in Romania, where it is remotely managing 70 transmitters for a large customer.
Miklius expects AirWatch 365 could gain major traction in the U.S. with the continued rollout of ATSC 3.0, particularly if broadcasters launch complicated single-frequency networks to deliver better mobile and indoor coverage. AirWatch 365 already had strong interest at the NAB Show, he says, and GatesAir planned to do pilot programs with three major station groups.
Competitor Rohde & Schwarz (R&S) has a similar offering in the form of a new product called RMTX, which stands for remote transmitter monitoring. RMTX uses a secure access gateway that sits between the transmitter and R&S and only sends out data to the R&S private cloud. A set of engineers in a support center are alerted if there are any concerns from the transmitter side and can immediately contact the customer to apply software updates over the air or ship out spare parts.
Erik Balladeres, VP, broadcast and media division for Rohde & Schwarz, notes that many chief engineers with transmitter knowledge are retiring and the few that are left are often managing multiple sites.
“It’s really a solution to allow the broadcaster to continue to support and service all their transmitters and not have any worries about dealing with problems moving forward,” Balladeres says.
The post In Monitoring And Compliance’s Varied World, A Raft Of Upgraded Offerings Emerge appeared first on TV News Check.
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