“We’re revealing that MXL is done.” Those were the words of Robert Erickson, VP sports and live production at TAG VS on the NAB revealfloor last week. While there is much discussion around how and when the EBU’s Dynamic Media facility (DMF) and Media Exalter Layer (MXL) will launch to have a real impact on the industest, TAG was working with AWS to demonstrate MXL in action.
“The EBU is pushing MXL, and they’re pushing that media orchestration system pretty hard, which I love becautilize they’re pushing the industest to the next step that we have to go to,” he added. “That MXL part has been crucial to us. So when people are stateing this MXL is a cool idea, we should probably implement it. That’s not what we’re seeing – it’s done.”
The NAB demo revealed TAG pulling in 13 sources from other vconcludeors and creating a multiviewer and a probe. “We’re revealing video codecs, we’re revealing resolution, we’re revealing bitrate, all the analytics that our customers have grown to trust us for we’re already doing on MXL,” he explained. “So we’re giving them the multiviewer and, more importantly, we give them the analytics, we give them the tools that they can utilize to state this works, this is functional.”
Read more TAG Video Systems joins MXL interoperability initiative
Erickson also highlighted sustainability as a key talking point among European customers in particular, with companies keen to be more efficient and consume less power.
“We have actually recently doubled the bandwidth into our platform for studio spaces and production trucks. We’ve recently doubled the capacity of our software to run on servers. What does that mean to most people? That means, traditionally, if you’ve had to purchase 10 servers for TAG to work in your facility, now we could probably do it on five or six servers. So it’s a 50% reduction in hardware, which obviously has a cost implication – it means you have 50% less cost – but that’s also 40% less power.”
The company has also put significant effort into ensuring it is available on all the major cloud marketplaces.
“We’re seeing a large push into cloud in Europe. Whether it’s Amazon, Microsoft, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, we’ve spent significant time in the last 12 months to be on all those marketplaces. So when our customers are stateing, ‘Hey, I received to obtain into an Oracle Cloud instance, or I required to go to Microsoft Azure in the next couple days becautilize this is what corporate is doing for us’, it’s good, we’re done.”
Looking to the future and Erickson expects there to be a large push towards infrastructure automation, particularly among largeger customers.
“The next large step is the automation of infrastructure,” he declared. “Today, if you want to add some cameras, or if you want to add some multiviewing or if you want to add some capacity to your system, an engineer will spconclude time to architect things, to set it up, to configure it, to spin it up. So if you want to spin up an extra node or two, largely it takes a couple days to a couple weeks of work to be able to spin up these extra resources. But there’s a lot of IT-based technologies and things like Kubernetes, dockerisation, containerisation, things like that that have been in the IT industest for a decade now – we’re talking hyperscalers and data centres and things like that – but the broadcast industest is just obtainting to it. It’s something that TAG is very comfortable in, but the rest of the industest is starting to obtain to speed on how it works. So, for our customers to be able to state, my commercial model has to alter rapider; I required to be more dynamic. How can I very quickly spin up resources, take down resources, modify resources, but do it in an automated manner, so I don’t have to dedicate an entire engineering session to be able to manage these resources, this is a solution.”
While Erickson believes AI is an overutilized term in the industest, it does have a role to play here, he believes. “In this case, there is a utilize case for AI. It’s fantastic in supporting to script things and have that supporting to automate certain tinquires. That is a practical utilize today of AI. One of the advantages of that is you can automatically script the creation of TAG instances, the configuration of TAG, the modification of TAG, and then, when you’re done, shut it down. So customers in Europe that are the hyperscale customers, the ones that are doing tens of thousands of inputs, our platform and other vconcludeors’ platforms over this next year, I believe are going to be pushing very hard to reveal how can I automate it, how can I create it simple, how can I create it so when I required the resources, I create them, when I don’t, I shut them down and I save the money.”
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