As broadcast infrastructure becomes more distributed, TAG Video Systems focuses on unified visibility

As broadcast production workflows grow more distributed, spanning on-premises infrastructure, cloud encoding, remote contribution and multi-platform delivery, the number of points where something can go wrong has multiplied considerably. So has the complexity of keeping track of all of them at once.

That visibility problem is the core to what TAG Video Systems is working to address, with a set of NAB Show announcements centered on real-time monitoring across cloud routing workflows, HDR quality control and participation in the emerging Media Exchange Layer interoperability initiative.

“Broadcasters want more visibility, more understanding of what’s going on with their streams,” said Michael Demb, vice president of product strategy at TAG Video Systems. “You have production on-prem, then you move your streams into the cloud, you have remote people dialing in and doing things, and then you need to distribute the content. So there are a lot of distributed points that need monitoring, and TAG brings it all into one single view.”

Monitoring meets cloud routing

The most concrete product news at the show is TAG’s integration with AWS Elemental MediaConnect Router, which reached general availability in November 2025. The MediaConnect Router allows broadcast engineering teams to dynamically route live video between sources and destinations within the AWS network — switching between primary and backup feeds, managing regional variants and handling multiple simultaneous feeds — without reconfiguring infrastructure each time routing decisions change.

The flexibility that is created is key for live production. When routes change dynamically, engineering teams need immediate visibility into what is moving where, at the signal level, without lag or guesswork.

TAG’s integration addresses that directly. At NAB, the company is demonstrating real-time monitoring of all contribution feeds moving through the MediaConnect Router workflow, with vector scope analysis and TR 101 error reporting visible for every inbound stream. When a route changes, the change appears immediately in TAG’s monitoring view.

“Cloud routing gives broadcast teams enormous flexibility,” said Golan Simani, director of cloud at TAG Video Systems. “TAG makes sure that flexibility never comes at the cost of visibility. Whatever is moving through your MediaConnect Router workflow, you can see it in real time, at the signal level.”

The AWS integration extended to a broader unified monitoring demonstration at the show, spanning a full primary linear distribution workflow across encoding, packaging and transport stream delivery alongside AWS Elemental MediaLive and partners including Aurora Networks and Zixi Zen Master. The goal, Demb said, is a single consistent monitoring layer across the entire chain from contribution feed to final output.

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HDR and the quality control question

HDR has been a recurring topic across the NAB Show floor this year.

For engineering teams, that shift introduces a new set of quality control requirements. HDR streams carry different metadata structures and signal characteristics than standard dynamic range content, and the consequences of delivering a malformed HDR stream to a platform or headend are immediately visible to viewers.

Demb said customer conversations around HDR have centered on basic but critical questions: is the stream in the right format, is the right metadata present, does the signal meet the specification the destination requires? TAG’s HDR QC toolset, which the company highlighted at the show alongside a product of the show recognition for its Lens root cause analysis tool, is designed to answer those questions before content reaches production.

“People want to know that they’re doing the right things, that they’re sending the right streams in the right format,” Demb said. “We’re building the tools based on what they really need in operations.”

The Lens tool, which the company said earned several product of the show recognitions at NAB, focuses specifically on reducing mean time to repair by helping engineering teams identify the root cause of stream problems faster rather than working backward from symptoms.

MXL and the next infrastructure layer

Beyond the immediate product announcements, TAG is participating in the emerging Media Exchange Layer initiative — a development the company said reflects where broadcast production infrastructure is heading rather than where it is today.

MXL moves video, audio and metadata through direct memory transfer rather than packet-based streaming, running natively across IP environments without the PTP clock dependency that has complicated SMPTE 2110 deployments. The practical outcome for broadcasters is the ability to build software-defined production facilities that can be deployed, reconfigured and scaled based on operational need, with cloud-based uncompressed workflows that 2110 never fully enabled.

“The inherent latency of ST 2110 can go away with MXL,” Demb said. “No CPU time in the application is spent on formatting and timing of 2110 packets, so not only can transport be faster than real-time, but more compute power is available for the application.”

TAG participated in a live multi-vendor MXL interoperability demonstration at the show hosted at the AWS booth, exchanging streams with participants including Grass Valley, Matrox and Techex. Demb said the interop phase matters because it is where the standard gets validated in practice rather than on paper.

“MXL is real, it’s working, and it’s actually really easy and simple to deploy,” he said.

For TAG, participation in MXL development is an extension of its existing approach to product architecture.

The company’s monitoring platform is software-native and built to operate across multi-vendor environments, a design philosophy that aligns with the IT-centric model MXL is built on. As production environments become more software-defined and dynamically orchestrated, the monitoring layer needs to work in those environments as well.

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