evertz.io | Blog | Video Observability
As a television broadcaster, how do I ensure that my channels are playing out the right thing for my viewers? Well, usually by watching and listening to it!
In the old days you would have a handful of channels, each broadcasting video and audio in a single language. You would hire an operator to sit in front of a few monitors and watch them all simultaneously.
A television stream is made of multiple spatiotemporal elements. Temporally: frames of video are rendered one-by-one in front of your eyes typically between 24 and 60 frames per second. The audio samples run even faster and create the continuous sound you hear. Spatially: within each frame there are visible elements such as overlaid channel branding logos, closed-captions, pop-up graphics to entice you to watch more on the channel and many more. The complexity doesn’t end there. These days there are multiple audio and captions languages streamed at the same time so as a viewer you can choose to watch a show with Spanish audio and English captions for example. Finally, there’s a world of data encoded into non-visible parts of the signal that inform downstream components to perform some action, like deliver local advertisements when they decode a trigger.
You can imagine the task of orchestrating all this complexity to come together into a seamless experience for the viewer! Playout automation services have been taking care of this problem for many years. Given a schedule describing the desired output, the automation controls a myriad of software services and hardware devices in real-time to produce the output stream.
