“The COVID pandemic saw OTT video streaming explode, and since then, several important new trends and standards have emerged in the creation and delivery of media content. Our new products and software updates address these new requirements and show continued improvements in terms of better content quality and efficiency,” said Anupama Anantharaman, vice president of product management at Interra Systems.

ORION Content Monitoring Suite for OTT and Linear/IP Video Ensures Better QoS/QoE
Interra Systems’ ORION-OTT is a comprehensive monitoring solution for live and VOD streaming. The solution is deployable in the cloud or on-premises. 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.

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 assuring 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 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, root cause, resolution to alerts and define maintenance downtimes to ignore unnecessary alerts, REST APIs to assure seamless third-party system integration, quality reports with daily and monthly channel availability, as well as outage analytics.

BATON — Optimizing QC Workflows
As the media industry’s leading ML- and AI-enabled automated QC platform, BATON addresses the most rigorous QC standards for quality and compliance. Recent updates to the BATON platform include major 4K and MJPEG enhancements, new audio/video quality checks for complex content, OAR watermark and enhanced Cinavia watermark checks, IMF Application 2 Extended, PSE for HDR, enhanced foreign language support in the BATON UI, support for Dolby Atmos, FLAC audio, and more. In addition, Interra Systems’ BATON Media Player offers improvements in loading and playback performance of 4K content.

BATON Captions, BATON WINNOW, and BATON LipSync for Superior Audio Quality
Interra Systems’ QC suite of products includes AI/ML-based tools such as BATON Captions, BATON WINNOW, and BATON LipSync to replace time-consuming and expensive manual processes with faster, more accurate machine-assisted 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 the 2022 NAB Show, Interra Systems will demonstrate BATON Captions with new support for next-gen format-specific checks, subtitling, stand-alone subtitle files for QC, recaptioning, exporting captions in MCC (MacCaption Closed Caption) 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 the 2022 NAB Show, 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.

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 supports new standards such as: Dolby Vision, Apple ProRes, VVC, 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 TS streams and help with root-cause analysis for a few errors that can cause problems related to transmission or audio/video quality.