The monitoring field faces challenges on multiple fronts, some of which seem to resurface every year, while others such as the conundrum of deep fakes have emerged more recently. Two key examples of the former are in quality of experience, and illicit stream redistribution piracy, both of which could be said to have been work in progress over successive IBCs dating back at least a decade.

The sheer proliferation of streaming services over the last few years has amplified both problems, rapidly expanding the targets for pirates and increasing demand for broadcast quality experiences. To some extent, earlier measures to address both were overwhelmed by the volume of traffic and users and put the onus on monitoring vendors to drill down deeper into the network and viewing devices, recruiting machine learning for the purpose.

The micro bitrate technology from Bridge Technologies, to be demonstrated at IBC 2024, exemplifies recent progress on the QoE monitoring front. The company argues that microbursts lasting just a few microseconds in some cases can collectively impair network performance and therefore QoE as perceived by users, without being detectable by many probes.

As the company has noted, while these microbursts may cause only momentary spikes in traffic, they have the potential to overflow the buffers of the network stack, imposing delays that can cause buffering or other artefacts, also increasing the lag in playback behind real time.

Among problems that have come to the surface more recently in the streaming world is that of content provenance. This has been flagged up by Telestream, an exhibitor of monitoring among other products at IBC 2024, noting that identifying the source of content the viewer sees after it has made its way through the media supply chain is a growing issue. The company says it will be an intense focus for its own research and development over the next year or two, with the aim of producing tools to help content creators track where their media comes from right across the supply chain.

Another monitoring exhibitor at IBC 2024, Interra Systems, cited identification of deepfakes as a major challenge for the industry. Yet effective resolutions to that problem are very much at the research stage, and these will involve some of the same AI technologies used to generate the deepfakes themselves.

There is hope in so far that it has been impossible to create a deepfake without leaving some fingerprint of the activity within the video frames. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are used to create deepfakes, where one Gen AI model generates the image and another attempts to detect that they are false. This results in an iterative process where at each turn the fake converges towards the real image to the point at which it reaches some threshold of undetectability for the GAN trying to identify the forgery.

That process itself though leaves some telltale pixels which a machine learning algorithm can be trained to detect. There are also some artefacts left by the imaging processes involved in creation of genuine images, so there is scope for distinguishing between those and the marks of the deepfake generation. We can expect another arms race to develop on this front.

Interra Systems is better placed at this stage to address issues it has been working on for some time, one being content aware quality assurance. This is related to content aware encoding and transmission, the overall objective being to prioritize packets associated with objects or portions of frames more critical for the experience over a bandwidth constrained network. This cannot be done without the ability to monitor at the content level to provide information needed for the algorithms to operate.

This is all part of the drive to improve QoE, as Ashish Basu, Executive VP – Worldwide Sales and Business Development, at Interra Systems, pointed out. “The industry is under immense pressure to deliver exceptional viewer experiences while optimizing resources,” said Basu. This is also work in progress, with Basu noting his company would be seeking feedback at IBC 2024 from the industry to inspire its development roadmap.

The issue of content awareness is related to compliance monitoring, which is a focus for Actus at IBC 2024. Compliance monitoring traditionally embraces loudness control, captioning, subtitles, and rules over accessibility in some markets such as the USA, increasingly reaching down into the content itself. For Actus it is folded into the broader monitoring suite, which makes sense given the growing overlap between all the functions.

“Our monitoring platform is a turnkey solution that covers everything from compliance recording and technical alerts for QoS and QoE to deep insights into the content Itself, including what has been said or seen in the media,” said Sima Levy, Actus Digital’s CEO. “This adds an extra layer of valuable data, all within one platform, fully leveraging both the compliance software and the hardware.”

Vendor Focus

Actus (Stand 7.C21) will be showing its intelligent monitoring suite, which is a turnkey system embracing compliance recording, technical alerts for QoS and QoE, along with insights into the content itself. “There are enhancements to our QA Compliance Logger, now including Actus AI Media Insight—AI-driven audio and video analysis capabilities, such as content transcription, translation, summarization, key highlights, ad detection, face recognition, and more,” said Levy.  She emphasized the importance of networking with partners and customers at IBC, the industry’s one truly global event of the year. “For us, these shows go beyond face-to-face meetings after a year of calls and emails; they offer an opportunity to step away from daily tasks and engage in meaningful conversations,” said Levy. “We talk about our customers' ideas, discuss features we can add to improve our system, or brainstorm ways to enhance the UI to make it more efficient and user-friendly. Any idea that comes to our customers' minds is valuable. We also appreciate hearing from customers about their future plans—whether it's new video protocols they intend to use or new metadata they need us to integrate. This helps us ensure we provide the necessary support when our customers need it and that we're fully prepared.”

Interra Systems (Stand 7.C11) will spotlight three core product lines: the end-to-end ORION monitoring suite for streaming, the BATON family of products for file-based QC, and the VEGA system for in-depth analysis. “We’re particularly excited to showcase BATON Captions, Interra Systems’ AI-powered solution that is revolutionizing captioning accuracy and efficiency around the world,” said Basu. “Additionally, we will be unveiling significant enhancements to ORION, including robust root-cause analysis for faster troubleshoot and features to improve quality of video and media delivery.”

Like Actus, Interra cited the primacy of IBC as a platform to connect with both existing and potential customers. “Interra Systems’ primary goals at IBC 2024 are to demonstrate the latest innovations that we have developed in line with industry trends and what we are hearing from our customers to about their key challenges,” said Basu. “We will also take this opportunity to gather further valuable feedback from the industry to fuel our development roadmap and expand our network.”

Bridge Technologies (Stand 1.A71) will promote enhancements to its Microbitrate analytics, integrated into its VB330, VB220 and VB120 and NOMAD monitoring products. This is the company’s secret sauce since it drills down in time to microseconds so that it can identify microbursts of traffic which, although often just artefacts normally not observed, can aggregate to cause noticeable decline in QoE.

They will also show the newly developed ‘StreamOverview’ functionality for the VB330 as a part of a version 6.3 upgrade. StreamOverview represents a new way of obtaining at-a-glance insight into the performance of a single channel, so that it can be assessed and troubleshooted as and when problems occur.

Bridge Technologies will also use IBC to launch the VB258, an upgrade module for their existing VB120 and VB220 monitoring probe lines, both of which accommodate a range of network standards, including IP unicasts and multicasts, OTT/ABR streams, and a whole range of RF formats, as well as SRT and ASI. The new VB258 addition will allow monitoring of up to four independent RF inputs, supporting DVB-T/T2, ATSC1.0/ATSC 3.0, DVB-C, QAM-B and ISDB-T formats. This makes it ideal for networks that incorporate terrestrial or cable delivery elements.

Each individual VB258 maintains capacity for four independent inputs the monitoring capacity can be doubled by placing two VB258 modules within a single chassis. Each input is also capable of round-robin operation to allow for monitoring of a full frequency raster, as typically found in DVB-C/QAM-B cable networks.

Speaking of this most recent addition, Chairman Simen K. Frostad said: “Whilst our role as IP evangelists has been what has defined us within the broadcast space, we recognize that not all broadcasters are ready or able to make a full transition to IP architectures. And we believe wholeheartedly that effective monitoring should constitute the backbone of any network delivery solution, especially those who are taking legacy components and beginning to hybridize them with IP-based standards”.

He continued: “We will be looking forward to demonstrating the entire range of Bridge monitoring solutions at IBC2024, with a particular focus on the way that our full range of monitoring probes can be combined to meet the unique needs of individual customer systems architectures, all accessible through a single, intuitive interface”.

Telestream (Stand 7.B11) will be showing its iQ video quality monitoring system formed by the acquisition of IneoQuest in 2017 and then enhanced by the products of Tektronix Sentry purchased in 2019, companies at the time respectively number one and two in the sector. Telestream iQ helps service providers navigate the complexity of SDI to IP migration, transition from traditional linear TV to OTT streaming distribution, and migrate to cloud technologies for any types of video delivery service.

At IBC Telestream will be parading AI enhancements and the fruits of ongoing rapid migration to a cloud platform, set to eventually house all its products. The company will be accentuating its ethical approach to AI, with steps to monitor the system itself and cater for errors in conclusions or recommendations.

Conclusion

These are exciting times for the traditionally rather slow-moving field of video monitoring. It is extending deeper into the content and embracing AI, which in turn is creating new challenges. Telestream talks of an inflation of capabilities associated with AI, but that could equally apply to the new threats associated with AI that need to be monitored, so it is a double-edged sword. At the same time the field continues to focus on the ongoing challenge of providing the information needed to guarantee QoE across streaming services across diverse platforms and devices. 

Other articles in this IBC 2024 'Show Focus' series:

The Broadcast Bridge will be at the IBC Show – on stand 8.A52. Please come and see us and share your thoughts on what we do and what you would like to see from us in the coming year.