TAG Video Systems to demo enhanced support for media workflows in AWS

TAG Video Systems is set to showcase an enhanced version of its monitoring and visualisation platform at NAB 2021. The company will conduct demonstrations in booth C2618 that will highlight its recently added support for AWS Cloud Digital Interface (AWS CDI) and Amazon EC2 M6i instance types, developed to better serve media customers running workflows in AWS.

Said Kevin Joyce, TAG Video Systems’ Zer0 Friction officer: “We are consistently adding features and functionalities to our monitoring and visualisation platform, plus we’re always adding support for the emerging technologies and formats that are driving the industry further into the cloud for live and remote production, and post-production. In the past few months, we’ve incorporated support for numerous protocols and we’re happy to announce that at NAB we will be demonstrating the platform enhanced with support for AWS CDI and the recently released M6i instances.”

Developed by Amazon Web Services, AWS CDI provides a way to reliably send high-bandwidth live media signals between AWS instances and AWS Media Connect, including uncompressed video signals and high bitrate signals such as JPEG XS. With the recent version, TAG now supports CDI for both inputs and outputs. This enables customers to build high-bandwidth media workflows in the cloud with minimal latency and pristine signal quality. Using CDI lets TAG customers avoid the signal impairments and concatenation errors of compression when cascading workflows through multiple AWS instances. CDI is key to create complex live production workflows in the cloud where maintaining signal quality and minimising latency is paramount. CDI is also useful in playout applications where statistical multiplexing of multiple channels is required to avoid concatenation artifacts of multiple encoders.

Released in August, Amazon EC2 M6i instances are powered by third-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors and are said to offer significant improvement in price/performance versus fifth-generation instances. TAG says its support of these new instance types enables customers to save as much as 58% compared to prior types while increasing capacity by more than 35%. With the new 128 virtual core M6i instance, customers can build even larger and more efficient TAG systems in the cloud meeting the demands of the most complex workflows all while saving on cloud costs.

TAG will also be demonstrating its monitoring and visualisation platform with numerous upgrades that have been incorporated since the last in-person NAB, including the addition of Adaptive Monitoring, and support for JPEG XS, Dolby Atmos, CMAF, MSS, SCTE, Irdeto KMS, Microsoft Azure and Sony’s Hawk-Eye high-performance camera.