Tag launches Realtime Media Platform to enhance decision making

Tag Video Systems has launched the Realtime Media Platform, an open-source paradigm that monitors, aggregates, manages and utilises data-driven viewer analytics to provide users with the insight required to build performant linear media systems. The multi-level Realtime Media Platform provides users with the tools they need for informed and intelligent decision making, something TAG says results in a precise viewer experience that leads to an increase in consumption, elevated customer engagement and heightened loyalty.

“We are incredibly excited to present our Realtime Media Platform to the industry,” explained Kevin Joyce, Zer0 Friction officer at Tag. “Tag has been the architect of so many industry firsts, and this is no exception. We were the first IP-based, all software integrated probing, monitoring and visualisation solution, the first (and only) to implement a Zer0 Friction strategy of asset utilisation, and now we are the first to provide our users with the open-source tools they need to extract accurate data-driven information and use it to truly improve both quality of service and quality of experience for their customers. The Realtime Media Platform will give them the insights they need to achieve better performance, streamlined workloads and help them hit the sweet spot of true customer satisfaction.”

Comprised of multiple levels, the foundation of the Realtime Media Platform is Tag’s MCM (Multi-Channel Monitoring), a software-based IP end-to-end monitoring, deep probing, logging and visualisation solution offering numerous deployment options including bare metal, virtual machine, cloud and hybrid. The MCM monitors every type of signal from live production through to over the top (OTT) delivery and supports hundreds of sources, including all the latest formats and transport methods such as JPEG XS, NDI 5, Dolby Atmos, SRT and AWS CDI. It provides real time visualisation across the entire video enterprise and deep probing for critical analysis into signal health and the networks that carry them, resulting in huge volumes of live source metrics and metadata. Signal metrics are displayed in realtime in TAG user interfaces, retained in TAG logs for analysis and exposed to third-party systems like DataMiner for aggregation and root cause analysis.

Now with TAG’s MCS that voluminous raw data can be aggregated and correlated using the power of the cloud and machine learning, leveraging TAG data and metrics to create actionable insights. Using an open-source paradigm, the MCS serves as an aggregation engine capable of exposing the data collected by the MCM to standard third-party analytic and visualisation applications such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Grafana and Prometheus to analyse and visualise data.

For the first time, media companies will be able to measure internet networks and CDN performance across all of their signals and know where to shift workloads for optimum performance. It will identify cyclical errors within the log file noise and drive faster root cause analysis and recovery from intermittent issues. By aggregating data across multiple customers’ CDNs and internet networks, TAG will provide real time CDN and network metrics to its customers, helping them steer around outages and congestion. It will correlate and identify problems across specific consumer devices, versions and platforms and identify content and delivery issues including bad source, origin, encoding; or CDN, regional or device problems, helping customers deliver interoperable signals.

“Until now,” Joyce added, “a lot of meaningful, insightful and actionable data was left in dusty logfiles that never saw the light of day. The Realtime Media Platform, with the MCS, provides users with the deep insight into quality, metrics and issues that will enable them to turn that data into a positive consumer experience with better curation, programming and improved integrity resulting in improved promotion, increased consumption and more customers with heightened loyalty.”