Caton Technology, a pioneer in next-generation IP network transport solutions, has addressed a key part of monitoring in its global transmissions through a partnership with TAG Video Systems. TAG, a market leader in realtime monitoring and multiviewing, supplies content inspection at any point along the transmission path to system management through the Caton Cloud Alliance, a programme which encourages third parties to add value and functionality to live transmissions by tightly integrating with Caton Cloud through its APIs.

Caton provides high quality IP transmission services, giving broadcasters and content owners an extremely reliable means of transporting live content to viewers anywhere in the world. The Media XStream service includes providing connectivity through the Caton Cloud, by using AI-based intelligent routing, which provides unparalleled reliability of six nines or better.

As part of the service, Caton provides full visibility of the network metrics so engineers can see the paths and the capacities used. But to complete the monitoring capabilities, it is also important to monitor and measure the audio/visual content of the media streams.

This is what makes the partnership with TAG extremely valuable: not only does it offer a flexible multiviewer solution which can accept signals from multiple points and is cloud-native, but also incorporates the new TAG Content Matching Technology which provides a means of comparing any point in the workflow against a user-defined reference. The supervising engineer can see at a glance the audio and video quality at the receiver and be notified of any issues in the transmission.

“With Caton Cloud, our customers can call up the highest quality transmission, from anywhere to anywhere, using the public internet,” said Michael Yang, senior VP at Caton Technology. “We extend our services using published APIs, and through the Caton Cloud Alliance we make it very easy to integrate additional services upstream and downstream. Perceived signal quality is obviously of vital importance to our users, which is why we welcome TAG Video Systems as our first technology partner.”

Michael Demb, VP Product Strategy at TAG Video Systems, said, “We have a comprehensive suite of solutions for monitoring, probing and data driven analytics, which further inform the visual and audible monitoring through our multiviewer displays and system UI. It is a natural fit for Caton and its transformational approach to IP content delivery, and we look forward to continuing collaboration and more business success.”

Caton Technology and TAG Video Systems are already working with broadcasters and content owners on implementing video and audio monitoring alongside network monitoring, as part of the service-based Media XStream offering.