TAG Video Systems: View from the Top 2021
It's no secret that streaming has exploded over the past two years. It was on its way, but Covid catapulted OTT content consumption to unprecedented levels, and predictions are pointing toward continued growth with video streaming responsible for most Internet traffic by 2022. Accessibility plays a role, but so does video quality. Operators must monitor hundreds — sometimes thousands — of channels without compromising real-time error detection. The better the product, the better the consumer experience and that translates to more loyal viewers and increased business for content owners.
Elevating the consumer experience to the highest-level possible requires deep insight into quality, metrics and issues; data that was previously beyond the reach of operators. Thanks to TAG's Realtime Media Platform, however, that data is now accessible. TAG's Realtime Media Platform, comprised of several modules, is the industry's most advanced and unique platform to aggregate, manage and display data.
Since 2008, TAG's MCM module has been performing advanced IP-based, monitoring, deep probing, and logging of every error at every point across the entire workflow with realtime visualization. Running on COTS hardware, offering more than 300 probing features, and supporting all major industry standards, the advanced all-software technology has addressed all transmission layers from the SMPTE ST 2110/2022-6 uncompressed to MPEG-TS compressed and OTT (HLS, MPEG-DASH, CMAF, JPEG XS, etc.) streams all the way down to the encoded video content and its quality.
But what if, in addition to monitoring and probing signals, accurate data-driven analytics could be mined, aggregated, managed and used as the foundation for decision making to build better, more engaging workflows? What if operators had access to open-source analytic tools such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Grafana and Prometheus to analyze and visualize data? What if they could leverage the power of the cloud and AI to create truly actionable insights into this voluminous amount of raw data with metrics to improve their performance, help them shift workloads dynamically to better performing suppliers, scale to manage unpredictable audiences and validate SLA agreements?
This is all possible now with the introduction of TAG's MCS, a module in The Realtime Media Platform that ushers in a new era of open, collaborative workflows. With MCS, users can learn significantly more from their monitoring and metrics. Customers can measure internet networks and CDN performance across all their signals and know where to shift workloads for optimum performance. MCS defines cyclical errors within the log file noise, driving faster root cause analysis and recovery from intermittent issues. By aggregating data across multiple customers' CDNs and internet networks, TAG can provide realtime CDN and network metrics to its customers, helping them steer around outages and congestion. The system will correlate and identify problems across specific consumer devices, versions and platforms, helping customers deliver interoperable signals. Powered by AI, users will be able to develop and deliver an exceptional customer experience that can be validated and measured, clearing the path for future-proof processes and greater success.
To provide even greater agility in probing, monitoring and data collection, TAG recently enhanced its Realtime Media Platform with an Adaptive Monitoring feature.
TAG is the only integrated probing, monitoring, and multiviewing solution to offer Adaptive Monitoring, a tool that allows the MCM to monitor in any of three operating modes—full, light, and extra-light on a per-input-source basis and in an adaptive manner resulting in the ability to monitor more probing points and leading to the efficient collection of more data in realtime. Using thresholds set by the operator within the TAG software or triggered by an API command from external devices monitoring the overall ecosystem, the system will automatically adapt between the monitoring modes to ensure optimal monitoring of all streams at all times. Adaptive Monitoring not only elevates monitoring capabilities when using on-premises hardware but yields even greater benefits for cloud-based operations with the ability to dynamically change utilization of instances based on need at any given time. with full visualization of errors.
In essence, the new Adaptive Monitoring functionality enables the user to choose the monitoring mode per channel with the ability to change it dynamically. Benefits include: optimization of CPU Usage without sacrificing error detection; operational flexibility; simpler cloud operation with increased agility when monitoring a massive number of channels; and better utilization and management of Cloud instances and hardware resources potentially reducing OPEX and CAPEX. It is a zero-compromise solution.
Enabling dynamic, automated, on-the-fly allocation of monitoring resources on a per-input-stream basis, TAG's Adaptive Monitoring feature brings operators significant efficiency gains that yield cost savings and/or more expansive monitoring capabilities using the same resources.
With its support of HLS, MPEG-DASH, and CMAF, TAG's Realtime Media Platform has become a go-to solution for OTT monitoring. TAG software empowers operators to address the complexity of OTT delivery chains and to take on both the technical and economic challenges of monitoring at scale The TAG software combines traditional MPEG-TS support with capabilities tailored to the unique monitoring requirements of OTT, including the ability to decrypt and decode the content in the secure zone, providing a comprehensive OTT monitoring and multiviewing solution.
For the growing OTT realm, TAG software not only supports efficient monitoring across all channels without compromise, but also provides a path for ongoing growth.
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