TAG Video Systems and Witbe combined their expertise, expanding video monitoring and quality assurance to cover the entire OTT delivery chain, and tested it out at the Big Game.
TAG Video Systems and Witbe have formed a strategic partnership to expand video monitoring and quality assurance to cover the entire OTT content delivery chain. TAG specialises in software-based realtime media monitoring and visualization, and Witbe develops post-device automated testing and monitoring for video service providers.
The partnership combines TAG’s monitoring, including its Content Matching tools, with Witbe’s Virtual NOC with automated video monitoring on real user devices. The result is a comprehensive monitoring system that covers the entire video delivery path – from the source feed to the actual viewer experience across multiple devices and locations.
"This partnership is another step toward TAG’s goal of achieving multi-application monitoring at scale through our Realtime Media Platform," said Ziv Mor, Chief Growth Officer at TAG. The TAG Realtime Media Platform for video quality visualisation includes deep probing and monitoring, alarms, integrated real time decryption, smart recording, analysis and latency visualization – all of which help maintain quality within a simple IP workflow.
The Witbe Virtual Network Operations Centre, like physical NOC, is a centralized location where a video service can be monitored as it is broadcast out to customers. The NOC displays the source stream for every live channel or video asset, so the operators can check for errors. However, what gets sent out may not be what viewers receive. Witbe's Virtual NOC allows providers to test and monitor how their service runs on real devices and networks, including Set-Top Boxes, Smart TVs and mobile devices.
Ziv said, "With Witbe's user-device perspective, our customers now have critical insight all the way to the viewer's device, allowing them to track virtually every quality aspect, including latency, across the entire network, from source to screen, and proactively address the ongoing demand for a smooth, uninterrupted viewer experience."
Monitoring at Scale
As part of their collaboration, TAG and Witbe joined forces in a case study during the NFL Championship 2025 (aka Super Bowl LIX) to demonstrate the strengths and features of their partnership. The case study shows their combined technologies in action, assessing both the network and the content delivered at the end-user level – in other words, the actual viewer experience. It includes monitoring of app performance, initial buffering time and content matching to verify the streams’ integrity.
For the first time, this study also measures latency between the various streaming platforms, which wouldn’t be possible without visibility into the end user stream. Together, the companies conducted comprehensive monitoring of the NFL Championship, streaming across platforms such as Tubi, Apple TV, Fire TV, YouTube and FuboTV, making new insights available into how the major services handled the challenge of delivering a smooth viewing experience.
“Partnering with TAG is going to allow us to solve two critical challenges for customers – accurately measuring the end-to-end latency, and ensuring the correct content reaches end-user devices,” said Mathieu Planche, CEO at Witbe. “With our combined expertise, we can now not only make it possible for content providers and broadcasters to measure the true quality of their services on real test devices, but also to gain insights into how their streams perform across the network.”
Consistently Competitive
The rapid growth of streaming has made it more critical now for content providers to deliver consistent, high-quality video experiences across devices and networks in order to remain competitive. By integrating TAG’s real-time network data analysis with Witbe’s real-time video quality analysis and active monitoring on real devices, the partnership enables service providers to gain considerable control.
As stated above, they can monitor and visualize their content delivery workflow from the source to the actual viewers’ devices. They can also measure and compare latency across different platforms, from the source through to the end user stream, examining video delay between traditional broadcast and OTT streaming devices. Service platforms can also ensure the right content is being streamed across the delivery path and arriving on end-user devices, as well as verify content switching to detect planned or unplanned changes during delivery.
A further capability is assessing key performance indicators such as initial buffering time, video quality, macro blocking and app performance on real devices with Witbe’s systems. At the sae time they can use TAG’s suite of measurements and inspections, carrying out continuous, in-depth monitoring with the visibility to verify potential viewer issues.
Insights from the Big Game
During Super Bowl, Witbe and TAG deployed their joint monitoring set-up across multiple locations and devices, collecting real-time data on latency differences between platform types – OTT vs traditional broadcast.
They were able to check streaming performance under peak traffic conditions, measure AV quality metrics across different networks and devices, and gain insights from real-time error detection and troubleshooting. The results will be compiled into a post-event report, giving insights into the evolving challenges of large-scale live streaming.
TAG’s Content Matching was used here to detect similar content across two different streams to ensure delivery to the intended destination. The tool creates a unique fingerprint for each video frame and audio envelope, to be matched across the full media distribution path against a user-defined reference point.
It is useful, as in this case study, for latency measurement between points in the workflow, or checking quality and content accuracy across different feeds to compare distribution methods. tagvs.com www.witbe.net
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