At IBC2022, Interra Systems will showcase its innovative and award-winning content QC and monitoring solutions covering the entire gamut of content preparation and delivery, from audio/video quality checks to 24/7 monitoring, captions, lip sync, and deep-dive analysis. With Interra Systems’ QC and monitoring solutions, media companies can address the most pressing industry needs, not just in terms of audio/video quality, but also creation and management of metadata, cloud and hybrid deployment, and tools to automate media processing and verification.
“We’re looking forward to riding the momentum from a very successful 2022 NAB Show into Amsterdam for the IBC Show, which marks our first appearance at a major European event since the pandemic began. In that time, OTT video streaming has exploded, and providers are looking for solutions that allow them to launch and monitor their media content more easily and efficiently, and with better quality,” said Anupama Anantharaman, vice president of product management. “Linear and OTT consolidation, cloud infrastructure, scalability, and centralized monitoring with customization, and sports media, especially in Europe, are driving our customers toward adopting new technologies and standards. Our new products and software updates address these new requirements and offer significant improvements in terms of content quality and efficiency to help our customers set themselves apart from the competition.”
ORION Content Monitoring Suite for OTT and Linear/IP Video Ensures Better QoS/QoE
Addressing a variety of cloud deployment scenarios for both live and VOD content, Interra Systems’ ORION-OTT is a comprehensive monitoring solution for live and VOD streaming. Recent enhancements to ORION-OTT include ad insertion monitoring, support for Dolby Vision and HDR, visual trending for QoS and QoE metrics, CPIX-based DRM integrations, and new audio/video quality checks. In addition, ORION-OTT now offers a flexible licensing model to accommodate dynamic bandwidth requirements, enhanced user reporting, revamped alert reports, improved recording for the entire duration of the error, a daily service availability report with outage analytics, and support for the DRMToday multi-DRM.
In addition to ORION-OTT, Interra Systems will demo its ORION solution for real-time monitoring of linear channels in an IP-based delivery infrastructure. New features include support for the monitoring of contribution stream formats (SRT/RIST), enhanced video dropout detection, additional audio quality checks (i.e., audio jitter, true peak levels, audio clipping, and stereo pair absence), CAS monitoring, HDR and ad compliance, visual trending for PMOS and blockiness, loudness reports, and user access control and secure HTTPS-based access.
New ORION 2110 Probe Simplifies IP Monitoring
Part of the ORION product suite, ORION 2110 supports the SMPTE ST 2110 standard, providing broadcasters with a future-proof, end-to-end monitoring solution for ensuring exceptional video quality in an IP distribution environment. Key product features include redundancy and NMOS integration, monitoring of IP-related parameters such as jitter and packet loss, scrambling control checks, DAI custom checks for ad insertion monitoring, support for monitoring SCTE-104 ad signaling, and exportable reports and video thumbnails.
OCM (ORION Central Manager) for End-to-End Visibility of Video
OCM provides enterprise-wide visibility by enabling the central management of multiple ORION linear and ORION-OTT setups present at the same or diverse geographic locations. By providing a consolidated, single-screen view of both linear and OTT workflows, OCM makes error detection and isolation faster and more efficient. OCM’s new features include smart tools and exportable reports for channel performance and alert trending; scheduled tasks to export reports; the capability to add comments regarding root causes and alert resolutions while defining maintenance downtimes to ignore unnecessary alerts; REST APIs to assure seamless third-party system integration; quality reports with daily and monthly channel availability; and outage analytics. In addition, support has been added for custom alert actions, as well as alert notifications over Slack, Microsoft Teams, HTTP Push, and more.
BATON — Optimizing QC Workflows
As the media industry’s leading ML/AI-enabled automated QC platform, BATON addresses the most rigorous QC standards for quality and compliance. Recent updates to the BATON platform include enterprise-level hybrid deployments (including auto-scale, on-premises, and in the cloud), major 4K and MJPEG enhancements; new audio/video quality checks for complex content; the detection and decoding of QR codes; OAR, enhanced Cinavia, and Nielson watermark checks; IMF Application 2 Extended; PSE for HDR; enhanced foreign language support in the BATON UI; support for the Dolby Atmos master format; AC4 and FLAC audio; enhanced DCP compliance per SMPTE 428-1:2019; optimized ProRes decoding; and more. In addition, Interra Systems’ BATON Media Player offers improvements in the loading and playback performance of 4K content; support for playing media files directly from S3, Azure, GCS, and FTP content locations or through YouTube URLs; and several usability improvements.
AI-ML Enabled Solutions
Under the QC umbrella, Interra Systems has exploited machine learning (ML) specifically in compliance and classification, where high accuracy can be obtained and content preparation can be made more efficient by replacing time-consuming and expensive manual processes with these solutions.
BATON Captions is an automated solution for all captioning-related needs, allowing broadcasters and media professionals to address requirements from caption generation to QC, auto corrections, reviewing, and editing for global distribution of media. At IBC2022, Interra Systems will demonstrate BATON Captions with new support for IAM-based S3 access, additional languages (e.g., Italian), distributed processing using multiple nodes, next-gen format-specific checks, subtitling, stand-alone subtitle files for QC, recaptioning, exporting captions in the MacCaption Closed Caption (MCC) format, and adding tags for tasks. BATON Captions features cutting-edge machine learning and automatic speech recognition technology.
BATON WINNOW, the company’s award-winning solution for content classification and identification, now performs with even greater efficiency when preparing content for different target markets and geographies. Powered by AI/ML technologies, WINNOW detects and tags content for violence, strong language, alcohol, guns, and more, based on user-defined rules. New features for WINNOW will be demonstrated at IBC2022, including language detection of visual text present in video, enhanced accuracy for detection of explicit scenes, and more concise display of text (i.e., speech, caption, and visual text) on PDF reports.
BATON LipSync leverages image processing and deep neural networks to detect audio and video sync-related errors. Capable of performing facial detection, facial tracking, lip detection, lip activity detection, and speech identification, BATON LipSync provides a comprehensive report of all lip sync issues.
Using BATON LipSync, available content can be checked in any language, independent of the region and area. The solution also supports the majority of industry formats and can be seamlessly integrated into any existing content processing workflow or used as a stand-alone application.
VEGA Media Analyzer (VMA) — Powerful Analysis for Next-Gen Media Workflows
Interra Systems’ VMA is an industry-leading analysis platform for standards compliance, debugging, and interoperability of encoded streams. VMA now offers support for the highest number of industry compression standards. The latest ones are AV1, VVC, Dolby Vision, ATSC 3.0, Dolby Atmos, DTS Audio, DolbyE Audio, Dolby AC4, Apple ProRes, HEIF, over and above AV1, HEVC, H.264, MMT, HLS, MXF, VP9, VP8, MPEG-2, MPEG-DASH, JPEG-2K, ISM, and PCAP.
VEGA Vista, a new addition to the VMA platform, enables media companies to receive or deliver video using the MPEG-2 transport stream format. The innovative analyzer can be part of automated workflows and offers granular-level customization of parameters and checks. Comprehensive reports provide deep visibility into MPEG-2 streams and help with root-cause analysis for a few errors that can cause problems related to transmission or audio/video quality.
