Industry Insights: How monitoring and QC are adapting to more complex workflows

Monitoring and QC are becoming central to how broadcasters manage scale, complexity and risk across increasingly distributed operations. As signal paths expand across IP, cloud, satellite, fiber, OTT and streaming platforms, teams need more than traditional eyes-on-glass monitoring to understand what is happening across the full delivery chain.

In this Industry Insights roundtable, part of NCS’ multi-part series on Broadcast Studios & Systems, vendors and suppliers examine how visibility, signal confidence and operational awareness are changing.

The discussion looks at AI-assisted QC, monitoring by exception, metadata-driven analysis, multiviewer evolution, alerting and escalation, and the growing need for systems that help operators identify which issues matter before they affect production or viewers.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• QC is scaling: Vendors said manual review cannot keep pace with multiplatform delivery, making automation and AI-assisted analysis increasingly important.
• Visibility is broader: Monitoring is shifting from confirming signal presence to understanding workflow health, content quality, metadata, network performance and viewer experience.
• Multiviewers are evolving: Traditional multiviewers are being pushed beyond video and audio display toward operational awareness platforms that combine signal, metadata, routing and analytics.
• Alerts need context: Teams are trying to reduce alarm fatigue by moving from raw alert volume to root-cause visibility and exception-based monitoring.
• Signal confidence is end-to-end: Confidence now means knowing that content is correct, compliant, stable and experienced properly across devices, networks and delivery platforms.

How are monitoring and QC processes adapting to increased scale and complexity?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Manual QC is being replaced by AI-driven automation to monitor stream health and actual viewer experience across multiplying endpoints. Solutions now continuously analyze video fidelity and bitrates in real-time, automatically flagging degradation before it impacts the user. This proactive approach is essential for maintaining a high quality of service in distributed streaming environments.

Graham Sharp, VP, sales and marketing, BCNexxt: The biggest single improvement is the disassembly of the playout process and the ability to automate QC ahead of time and then manage multiple channels by exception.

Ali Hodjat, senior director of marketing, Telestream: Human operators can no longer realistically inspect every hour of content generated for multi-platform delivery, driving the industry to embed production-ready artificial intelligence and signal processing directly into media pipelines. These intelligent QC tools automatically handle time-consuming tasks like lip-sync validation, multi-language caption verification, profanity detection, and even visual content authenticity checks at machine speed. By converting deep media analysis into machine-readable metadata, operations can catch compliance and quality errors instantly, allowing engineers to focus strictly on resolving exceptions rather than performing repetitive reviews.

Michael Demb, VP, product strategy, TAG Video Systems: The formats have multiplied from 2110 and MXL to NDI, JPEG XS, MPEG-TS, OTT, and customers need to monitor all of them from one place, correlating data and helping operators react in real time. We’re seeing more demand for deep QC capabilities, like HDR quality control for streaming, and for tools that go beyond basic alarms into understanding what the data is telling you. The goal is to give operators confidence that the right content is in the right format with the right metadata before anything goes out the door.

G Morgan, EVP, sales, Globecast Americas: Monitoring and QC have moved from a channel-by-channel mindset to an end-to-end service assurance model across satellite, fiber, IP, cloud and multiple digital delivery paths. The challenge is not simply collecting more alarms, but also knowing how to analyze the data and producing useful operational intelligence that shows which alerts matter, what services are affected and what actions are needed. Automation is essential for scale, but expert human oversight remains critical for exceptions, escalation and maintaining confidence across the full workflow.

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Erik Ott, CEO, Mediaproxy: Monitoring and QC operations, which are now both human and technology-based, have been adapting to the greater scale and complexity of broadcasting and streaming over the last 20 years through increased automation and less hardware. Today’s software compliance systems and multiviewers are specifically designed to monitor and log program outputs, catching any faults as streams are distributed to multiple platforms and devices.

How are monitoring systems evolving to provide meaningful visibility across complex operations?

Heather Mellish, VP of global sales, Zixi: As workflows become more distributed, monitoring has shifted from simply determining whether a signal is present to understanding the health and performance of the entire workflow. Operators need visibility into content quality, network performance, processing stages, and delivery outcomes across multiple systems. Effective monitoring provides actionable insights that help teams identify and resolve issues before they affect viewers.

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: Monitoring systems are evolving from collections of separate tools into unified environments that provide visibility across the entire workflow. Multiviewers remain an important part of that picture, but they now incorporate signal health, metadata, routing information, and operational context alongside the video itself, giving operators a much more complete view of what is happening across the infrastructure. And increasingly, monitoring-by-exception and intelligent alerting are helping teams focus on the issues that actually require attention instead of asking operators to watch hundreds of signals simultaneously.

Miroslav Jeras, CTO, Pebble: As broadcast operations grow more complex, monitoring systems face a fundamental challenge: providing meaningful, actionable visibility across infrastructure that spans multiple vendors and multiple systems, and the answer lies in open standards that define a common language for status reporting. AMWA’s NMOS BCP-008 is a good example, establishing a minimum status reporting framework for IP-based devices, covering connectivity, synchronization, and stream validation, giving operators a consistent and concise view of system health regardless of vendor. Pebble has been actively involved in drafting BCP-008, and we believe this kind of standards-driven approach is the right foundation for monitoring systems that actually serve operators rather than adding to their workload.

Erik Ott, CEO, Mediaproxy: Monitoring systems continue to evolve through making the software processes more resilient in dealing with scale, which involves comprehensive monitoring and logging that can be arranged as microservices to scale for specific parts of the distribution chain. More sophisticated metadata and automation, including judicious use of AI, will also provide greater oversight of expanded workflows.

What does “having confidence in the signal” mean in today’s environment?

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Having confidence in the signal today means knowing that content is not only delivered successfully but also experienced as intended by viewers across every device and network. As streaming workflows become more complex, visibility into playback performance, quality metrics, and viewer experience is just as important as monitoring the transport path itself. At VisualOn, we believe true signal confidence comes from end-to-end observability—from content delivery to the actual playback experience.

Charlie Dunn, executive vice president, products, Telestream: It means two things. Can I see the signal in a multiviewer and, at a glance, know that things are working as I expect? These are the right feeds, they all have audio, and this gives me confidence that I’m ready to do my production or that my production is working well. The second part is some automated surveillance that’s looking for things that I can’t easily see on a multiviewer or use a multiviewer to troubleshoot.

Peder Boberg, product owner, Intinor: Confidence today means knowing that your signal will survive unpredictable public internet paths and complex network hops, because you have built-in resilience working in the background. It requires practical solutions like seamless network bonding, adaptive bitrate, and forward error correction with re-sending, allowing operators to rely on comprehensive telemetry and know the feed will remain stable before a drop-out ever occurs.

Michael Demb, VP, product strategy, TAG Video Systems: It means knowing your stream is in the right format, that the right metadata exists in the stream, such as captions, SCTE markers, audio statistics, and that quality checks have run before content goes into production, and to do all of this at a much higher scale than ever before. Customers are asking us: am I sending the right streams with the right technical parameters for each platform? Assurance about signal means being able to answer yes to all of those questions, not just some of them.

Erik Ott, CEO, Mediaproxy: It means everything. Broadcasters, streamers and operational staff must know for certain that the program distribution chain conforms to technical and regulatory standards and if there are any problems, they can be detected and dealt with quickly. This means having processes and tools in place that get diagnostics and intelligence from all parts in the chain and aggregate a view to them via a unified interface.

Where are traditional multiviewers falling short?

John Mailhot, SVP, product management, Imagine Communications: The primary limitation of traditional multiviewers is that they were built for a world where operators mainly needed to confirm that audio and video were present. Modern media operations are far more complex, spanning IP networks, cloud resources, software services, and multiple delivery platforms — meaning visibility has to extend beyond the signal itself. As a result, we’re seeing multiviewers evolve into broader operational awareness platforms that combine video, metadata, routing information, monitoring data, and analytics into a single environment.

Ali Hodjat, senior director of marketing, Telestream: Traditional multiviewers fall short primarily at the boundary of ground-to-cloud live contribution paths, specifically when monitoring remote video feeds transported over SRT networks. While a standard video mosaic grid can alert an operator that a remote feed has frozen or dropped, it cannot tell them where the packet loss or jitter occurred along that complex, distributed internet path. Overcoming this limitation requires moving beyond static visual displays toward cloud-optimized observability services that combine live “eyes-on-glass” monitoring with retrospective troubleshooting telemetry to instantly isolate whether a signal failure happened at the source, during cloud transit, or at the decoding edge.

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Chris Scheck, head of marketing content, Lawo: Traditional multiviewers have a fixed upper limit and require cabling changes, and mixed-format sources, both with and without video compression, are rarely supported. IP-based multiviewer apps, on the other hand, allow adding more tiles (PiPs) to the layout and routing the desired video streams there using an intuitive software application. A multiviewer with an intelligent proxy system, finally, allows to tame IP bandwidth requirements for signals assigned to small tiles, and the number of tiles can be set anywhere between 1 and 64 for each project.

Erik Ott, CEO, Mediaproxy: By being too focused on just video and audio. Most multiviewers do not provide a comprehensive toolset that goes across the entire distribution chain to give a full picture of the program at final delivery. This calls for widgets that visualize richer tools showing metadata across an aggregated network, interactivity and review tools that reduce the time it takes to deal with incidents.

How are teams prioritizing what to monitor as signal paths multiply?

Erik Ott, CEO, Mediaproxy: It should not be a case of prioritizing what to monitor because everything is prone to errors and all streams or signals should be monitored equally. Monitoring by exception flags up problems as they occur and allows operators to deal with them immediately.

What role does alerting and escalation play in preventing on-air issues?

Erik Ott, CEO, Mediaproxy: A vital one because faults of all types and levels of seriousness — from loss of audio to black frames to complete signal failure — should be dealt with immediately.

How are organizations reducing alarm fatigue while still catching critical issues?

Michael Demb, VP, product strategy, TAG Video Systems: The answer is moving from volume-based alerting to root cause visibility, giving operators the tools to identify what caused a problem (not just that a problem exists). Our Lens feature is built around this: reducing mean time to repair by helping operators find the root cause faster, so they’re not chasing noise.

Erik Ott, CEO, Mediaproxy: By having better, more efficient and automated systems, run by experienced operators and engineers, to ensure the right alarms relating to the type of event are dealt with quickly and efficiently.