HITS

The integration of the TAG Video Systems platform into the Zixi ZEN Master platform offers a “force multiplier” for broadcast and over-the-top (OTT) service providers, John Wastcoat, SVP of business development and marketing at Zixi, said Dec. 7, during the webinar “Zixi ZEN Master and TAG for Enhanced Monitoring and Unified Control.”

“TAG has been natively integrated into the Zixi Zen Master control plane for unified management and large-scale configuration of comprehensive multi-channel monitoring for hundreds of metrics and multi-viewing for primarily the media and entertainment industry,” Wastcoat said at the start of the webinar.

Also during the webinar, Paul Shore, director of product management, ZEN Master, at Zixi, and Michael Demb, VP of product strategy at TAG, detailed the feature set and functionalities of each platform, and then provided a demonstration of how real-world customers use the integration and benefits from the technologies.

The integration helps customers “better visualize, probe and monitor their video flows in different, on-prem, cloud or hybrid environments,” Demb told attendees.

Noting that TAG has been around for over 15 years, Demb said: “We’re primarily focusing on software-based and IP workflow solutions [and] the products that we’re building [are] helping our customers in the M&E industry, whether they’re doing live production, layout or content distribution. We’re trying to simplify the very complex video workflows that our customers have to deal with and helping them to manage those environments or ecosystems – whether they’re on-prem environments, cloud [or], as we see a lot more those days, a combination of two hybrid environments.”

TAG’s applications are “built on top of an advanced video processing engine that supports a very wide range of formats and standards and it can accommodate all kinds of media workflows in a single product,” he pointed out. TAG also “not only processes the video; we’re also doing deep probing for errors, alarm conditions, and we’re sending those alarms through various interfaces for visualization of those sources and alarms in real time,” he said. “We also collect a lot of data during this process.”

Shore then provided a quick overview of the Zixi software-defined video platform, which he said supports “processing and delivery of video streaming over any IP network [and] supports any protocol on the ingest and delivery side.” Also, it “can work with any cloud provider,” he said, adding: “Similar to TAG, it’s primarily a software install. So it can be installed locally in a data center or in any of the cloud providers. We also interoperate more deeply with some of the major cloud providers … and we are also integrated into or can interoperate with any edge device.”

The Zixi platform now “enables the largest portable video system for delivering live video,” Shore went on to say. “We’ve installed in hundreds of thousands of instances globally … [and is] currently managing over half a million live sporting events annually. That’s a number that’s growing rapidly and expected to continue to do so. And, while we’re doing this, we are capturing well over 10 billion telemetry data points every single day of how video is being transported and how reliable it is and what issues may or may not occur during that process.”