Transcript:
Steve:
Glad you could join us today. If you need to monitor your on-air chain, you’re in the right place. Today you’ll find out about a station group and how they consolidate all their monitoring and status into one place, find out more about lighthouse applications, and have a look at D2Monitor in action. We’ll finish with a QA session, so if you have any questions along the way, just go ahead and put them in the chatbox and we’ll answer them all at one time at the end. I’m Steve. I’m here today with Jess. Hey Jess, how are you doing?
Jess:
Hey, Steve. I’m doing great. Very, very excited to be here. This is a much-needed product. Excited. How are you doing?
Steve:
Doing good, so let’s go ahead and get started. The first thing we’re going to talk about today is a station group. Actually, it’s owned by Keith Leach, who has actually joined us on the webinar today. And what Keith is doing, he’s with One Ministries and they have about five-point to point links. They’re in the bay area. Mostly received sites are on remote mountaintops with limited bandwidth, so this makes a very challenging network, which is ideal for SRT. SRT can re-send lost packets when things get on these band limited networks. So when they get lost, it’s able to recover, and it can stay on the air, even in the event of these significant packet losses. Because of these challenging routes, it’s also very important to be monitoring them. So in case one of these satellite or network links does go down, we can inform the station group and then they can let the network provider know and get it corrected and have the issue corrected properly. Another type of application using something similar as a hub and spoke. Jessica, I believe that GBN is using that type of application.
Jess:
Yeah, Global Bible Network. They basically have, I guess what we’re calling a hub and spoke, which is one location that sends out to many different locations. Kind of like a bicycle, hub and spoke. And they have a TOC area, and then they’re sending it out to ministries and television stations all over the country. And so it really would behove them if they could keep their eyes on everything going out at one time, especially being that some of the outlying areas where they’re sending the signal to aren’t really television engineers. Some of them are IT people, some people are just not technical at all. So it’s really a good idea if they had some way to keep an eye on their entire chain in one spot.
Steve:
That’s great. So there’s kind of a couple of ideas, examples here of multiple point to point locations or a hub and spoke where you’re sending out and you’re using all these separate routes all across the country, using the public internet. So it’s very important to keep an eye on the quality of those routes. And also, as Jessica was saying, a lot of times at the endpoints, there may not be an actual station engineer there. So sometimes it’s kind of good to have… Where we can get on there and kind of see what’s going on and kind of give some added engineering support here, remotely. Another thing we do that’s sort of the opposite, instead of the hub and spoke, we have the spoke and hub, which good application. It’s like Jessica’s lighthouse application.
Jess:
Right, exactly. So especially with ATSE three coming up and it’s eventually going to, I guess, become popular eventually. What’s going to happen is, every station is going to put their ATSE 1.0 into a particular lighthouse transmitter. So that way, it’s going to be a legacy for those that aren’t ready to go to. ATSE 3.0. It’s going to be very similar to what we did about 20 years ago when we went HD and all the stations still had to send an old analog signal for those that weren’t in HD yet. So in this kind of case, every single station is pretty much going to send their dot one channel to a lighthouse, one way or the other, whether it be microwave. But in this case, if you’re sending it SRT, which I think is probably how a lot of people are going to do it, this is the exact opposite of hub and spoke. It’s where there’s a whole bunch of spokes coming into one hub, and again, it’s going to be really nice to keep track of all of the feeds coming in at one time.
Steve:
That’s kind of a great application therefore using both SRT and the monitor. Kind of see all these different routes coming into one location, making sure they’re getting there properly. Now we’ve kind of been talking a little bit about the D2Monitor and SRT and how they interwork and some different types of applications. So now let’s actually take a look at D2monitor in action. So I’m going to go ahead and share a screen here so we can see it. Jessica, can you see that?
Jess:
Cool. Yeah, yeah. I got it.
Steve:
Okay. So kind of what we’re looking here, just a little bit here. So I’m logged in as an employee of D2D, so I can actually go into the company view and select which company units I want to look at. If you’re a customer, you would just have your own views. You’d just see your own unit. So right now, what I’m looking at is just some test units we have as we’re kind of developing D2Monitor and just working on our own units, so that we can monitor them. And one particular interest here is, you go down here and we have a unit here called San Diego, Jack sent. So that’s actually out of Jessica’s location, San Diego. And you can see she’s actually here. It’s picking up an ASI feed, which is coming up on a local TV station there. Then she’s routing it out to her ASI output so she can monitor the signal there locally. And then she’s also creating an SRT listener, so that somebody can pull that stream.
Steve:
And then what’s happening over here, you can see in San Diego, Jack’s received, which is actually in a unit sitting right behind me here. I’m pulling that signal into my ASI and then I’m sending it out… Or excuse me, I’m pulling it into my IP here. You can see that she has her listener set to port 3008. And then you can see over here, on my SRT caller, I’m basically calling her Wayne address with that port number. That makes the connection, and I start pulling the stream here. And then I’ve taken one of those channels, the channels she’s sending me, and taken out ASI so I can view the program here. So we had this nice route going from all the way across the country, from San Diego to Jacksonville, and monitor both ends right here in one location.
Steve:
One thing I’m going to do here now is, I’m going to… I’m basically going to shut down. So as I just announced, I just shut down the San Diego Jack’s received unit here. And what you will see is, you can see here now where the sent unit is still the uptime. It’s still going up here. You’ll see the uptime is not updating on the receiving end because it stopped sending messages. And what we should see hereafter… It takes a minute because we don’t want to kind of send any false alarm. So we do wait for a minute of a unit not checking in before we actually declare it off-air and go into an alarm state. We’ll just give it a little bit longer here, and we should see it switch over. But while we’re kind of waiting for that, we can also see that Jessica has got another one of her units here. This is actually one of our 52 20s, which has a lot more inputs and outputs.
Steve:
And you can see that it is kind of… She’s got multiple routes coming here and multiple IPS going in to ASI so she can monitor all this, to make sure everything’s looking proper. And as you can see now, it just grayed out, showing that… Now you’ll see that no longer shows an uptime. It now wants the last check-in, showing this unit hasn’t checked in, in the last now minute, 12 seconds. It’s now showing it’s offline. And if you go over here to our D2 care, it’s actually sent us a notification that that unit failed to check-in, and it gives us an indication when it last checked in. Then at the same time, if you’re a customer, you would get that same email. So it’s notifying both us and you, that that unit’s gone offline.
Steve:
So then we can go here. I can actually restart that unit back up. Okay. And you’ll see that it’s come back online and reconnected to Jessica’s unit. Everything looks good. Then at that point, we can go over to the alarm’s page, and you’ll actually see that the unit was alarmed here. Now one thing we do is, once a unit has been alarmed and we have sent an email notification, we do flag it that it’s alarmed. Because one thing we don’t want is, if there’s a bad network and the network’s been up and down every five, 10 seconds, we don’t want to send an email out every five, 10 seconds. So once it’s actually been alarmed, we flag it. And then it won’t alarm again until you actually come over and clear the alarm. So at this point, that unit will not alarm again, if it was to ever go off.
Jess:
It’s brilliant.
Steve:
Then also, I was talking a little bit earlier about One Ministry. So we can go here, and I’ll switch over to his units, and you can see all the different routes he has going on. This top one here, you send in from… Cato unit sending here, to the received. Everything’s looking good. But one thing that gave me an idea of just how effective SRT is. So here’s a site he sent into, that he sent in his programming to the dove, which is a religious broadcaster. And so this unit’s been up just for three days. Yeah. Just under four days, this unit’s been running. And in those four days, it has lost, or there’s been almost one and a half million packets that have had to be retransmitted.
Jess:
Wow.
Steve:
But not a single package has been dropped. So that kind of just gives you an idea of what SRP is capable of, that it can recover from a million and a half retransmitted packets in just a matter of four days. So it’s a really effective technology for sending stuff over the public internet.
Jess:
No doubt.
Steve:
So that’s kind of a little example of the capability that the D2Monitor service is capable of. And it’s kind of nice because not only do we get to see it, but if you’re a customer, you get to be able to see your units as well and be monitored, be alerted of anything, if you go offline, if any of your inputs sync. So now that we’ve kind of shown you a little bit, we’re going to open up to questions here, see if anybody has any questions. And as I say, everybody’s muted, but if you have any questions, feel free to enter it into the chatbox and we’ll go ahead and get those answered.
Jess:
Hey Steve. Yeah, we actually got a couple of questions already coming in. Let me see. One would say, how would this work with OTT services over the top?
Steve:
I guess it depends on which particular OTT service. Most of what this is here, is using basically transport syringes and SRT. We are adding some capability to use more of an HSL type, which would be more of a traditional over the top. And once we have that in our system to support that, it would work just the same. On here, you would see a similar type. Instead of this being SRT, you could see something about HLS or whatever other over the top protocol you’re using. So it should work seamlessly within monitor, once we just add the support for HLS within the flex system itself.
Jess:
Great. Yeah. That’s true, I guess. That’s a great question. Got another question about, how often does it polar update? How often does D2Monitor ask for information?
Steve:
So currently, it basically is broadcasting every three seconds. That’s kind of set right now. We are kind of looking into possibly making that more user-configurable, if they want to kind of either speed up or slow down how much it is updating. But you get an idea. If you see here, you should see kind of these… In this particular unit, the uptime should be changed about every three 15, then she got 18. So it’s basically on a three-second interval at the moment, is how fast it is sending it out its status.
Jess:
Great. So about every three seconds, I guess, is when it updates the status.
Steve:
Yes.
Jess:
Very cool questions flying in right now. Would this work with SMS text messaging?
Steve:
It doesn’t. Well actually, it really should. We were actually talking with the developers earlier, and you should basically… SMS is really just sending an email to that phone address, so that actually should work. Have to talk a little bit with them how we actually enter it into the system, what the format is. But you should be able to basically send the email to a phone, which will show up then as a message within your phone text.
Jess:
Right. On my phone, my email and text messages pretty much come in the same amount anyway. So, I guess you could have your email forwarded to a text message. More questions. Is there a way to see an error to an individual stream? So if a particular stream went offline.
Steve:
Well, that’s what I was showing. So that’s one thing we’re showing here, we don’t actually have here at the… Not showing here at the moment, but you could… Yeah, but it would show if an individual stream lost sync. I mean, that’s kind of the question. So, that is kind of one thing it’ll alarm. If one of these IP streams, or you had ASI in this case enabled, and we’d lost sync on that for a certain time interval, that would also alarm as well.
Jess:
Okay.
Steve:
So it’s not just the unit going down, it’s also the loss of sync on the input. So what’s kind of really nice about that is, just the nature of a lot of the applications we do is, the receive unit is right there at the transmitter. So it’s kind of right there at the end of the chain. So by looking at our input, you can see if you’re having an issue somewhere upstream. So if we were to kind of lose sync on our input, we could let you know that, “Hey, you may want to check your upstream multiplexer, your upstream encoder, because something happened to the stream coming into us.” So that’s kind of a really nice thing about us being at the end of the chain, that we can sort of monitor all your upstream equipment as well.
Jess:
Great. Yeah, that’s a great answer.
Steve:
And another thing, I guess along those lines, that we’re adding into it. So right now, we’re basically detecting that the unit stops checking in or we lose sync. But some of the things we’re going to be adding here in the near future is, monitoring continuity counts. So if the streams coming in but you’re just losing a lot of unpaid packets, kind of another indication you may want to check your upstream encoders or multiplexers, see what’s going on. So one of the things we really want to do with this is, by kind of monitoring some of these statistics, like for the network of SRT, if you are getting a lot of retransmissions or you’re getting some drop packets, to kind of let you know about this so you can try and work your ISP to get it fixed. Because if you have just a handful of dropped packets, it’s probably okay. You may see occasionally a glitch in your screen. But if it continues to get worse over time, you may get to the point that you basically end up going off-air.
Steve:
So one of the things we really want to do with the monitor, is not just letting you know when something has happened to take you off-air, but to give you some indications that you’re kind of heading that way and let’s get it taken care of before your viewers can’t watch your program. So we want to kind of avoid that at all costs and try and be more proactive instead of reactive.
Jess:
Right, of course. Because engineers don’t like getting that call on a Monday morning saying they’re off the air half the weekend, right? Or whatever. So this sort of is proactive to not going off the air. And I could imagine, this whole gooey right now that’s in front of us, being up on a monitor in master control or something like that so everybody can have an eye. And when I see a red barn, they know to go and look into it. So that’s actually a good segue into the next question, which is, is there any plans to add a transport stream analyzer? I guess they mean, a TR 101 290 deck tech or send core type transport stream analyzer.
Steve:
Sure. That’s a great question, Jessica. And that’s kind of how we talk a little bit of soon be having the ability to trigger on continuity count errors and things of that nature, or transport stream error indicators. So in the monitor itself, it’ll probably be more just these… You’ll see more of the global type analyzer things and continuity count errors, total for the system, transport stream error indicators. But we are basically putting in a DTR 290 analyzer within the flex system.
Steve:
So what you could do… The monitor may show, hey, you’re getting a lot of continuity count errors on this particular stream. And then what you can do is then, login to that stream where it’ll give you… Or login to that unit, where it’ll give you access to the full monitor where you can actually drill down and see continuity count errors on individual PIDs, bit rates on individual PIDs. Putting capabilities into do PCR jitter detection. So that’s ongoing, and that’s a lot of information to be constantly sending back to the monitor. So be kind of more… There’ll be more global statistics, which will be sent back to the monitor. And then if there’s an issue or a unit or stream which is having a particular issue, then you would kind of login to that particular unit and see the full analyzer.
Jess:
Right. Okay. Yeah, great question.
Steve:
Oh, go ahead. Yeah. You’re kind of getting ahead of me. Let’s see what the next question was. Or you may be kind of predicting where I’m going.
Jess:
Well, they’re coming fast and furious. So the next question is, is there any way to control the units through RSSH or some other way, through a VPN? So for instance, if I do need to get to a flex 3000 that’s at a mountaintop 3000 miles away, can I do it through this platform?
Steve:
Correct. So, you definitely can do that. A few things we’re working on at the moment. One, right now with the VPN. So here at the NOC, we have the D2Monitor server. It also has VPN supports, so all the units would ship out now. You have the capability of basically putting in the VPN credentials, check-in your unit to the VPN, and at that point… We’re soon adding here, where if you are connected to the VPN, there’ll be a little link here just pressing that. It’ll take you right to the login page.
Jess:
Wow.
Steve:
Of the unit. And there’s some other things. If you’re not on the VPN, we’re looking at some things which may be able to give us full access if you’re not on the VPN. But at a worst case, we will be coming out with, even if you’re not on the VPN, the units will be basically able to pull commands from the monitor using HTTP, or at least be able to kind of tell the unit to… So here, you have all these statistics of how many packets are retransmitted.
Steve:
So there’ll be the capability to at least send commands to the unit to clear the statistics, so you can see more current statistics or to reset the unit or command it to go download the latest firmware and install it. So we at least have, if you’re not on VPN, where you can send the commands to do different things. We’re not sure yet if we’ll be able to get the full user interface if you’re not on the VPN. But if you’re on the VPN, there is no problem with… We’ll have a link here, you click on the link and it’ll take you right to the login page.
Jess:
Wow, great. That’ll be handy. More questions. Is the loss of sync only on ASI or would it work with the loss of SRT also? So if you lose SRT, would that also generate an error? I think I know the answer.
Steve:
Correct. Yeah. The loss of sync on any, whether it’s IP or ASI, will generate an alarm.
Jess:
Any input? Great. Yeah, of course.
Steve:
Correct. And actually, any output as well. Typically, there shouldn’t really be an issue on the output. But if for some reason we’re receiving, it’s supposed to be going out and it’s not going out… Or it could be something for whatever… Just a configuration got changed, and now you had an output that was enabled, but you’re no longer sending anything to it. It will generate alarm that may be kind of an indication that, oh yeah, I didn’t quite set this up the way I wanted to. Or you may want to just then disable that output if you’re not actually using it. So it will actually alarm if an output is enabled and also doesn’t have any data going out on it.
Jess:
And it looks like we lost your D2Monitor screen. You must have shifted off of it somehow. There you go.
Steve:
Is it back?
Jess:
Yep. Perfect.
Steve:
Are we seeing okay?
Jess:
Yeah.
Steve:
I guess I did the screen instead of the window.
Jess:
This next question is really good. I would imagine, in the future, it’s possible. Is there a way to see a thumbnail or proxy of the video stream? Kind of, I guess, like what Ts reader does.
Steve:
That’s things we’re kind of looking into. It may be something that, maybe if you click on a unit that you could do it. Because one of the potential issues is, it starts becoming a lot of bandwidth. If there’s a lot of units being monitored and they’re all sending back video streams, that could get quite data intensive. But that’s something we can definitely look into putting some sort of thumbnail. Maybe even if it’s kind of a slow update. So you may not be able to watch true video, but at least see there’s… Every few seconds you’re seeing a new frame pop up, to know that there is something on air.
Jess:
Yeah. Just not good enough for QC, but good enough just for monitor control to see that it’s there, which I would think that would need another rendering machine because that would take up an enormous amount of hardware and bandwidth. So it’s a great question though. I think I could see that happening sometime in the future, without a doubt, especially if people request it. Next one. I think I already know the answer. Is there a way to encrypt by using AES, SRT?
Steve:
Well, for SRT specifically?
Jess:
Yes.
Steve:
Yes. You can encrypt SRT. This screen actually here right now, is not encrypted. But yes, it does support AES encryption for SRT, if you do want to encrypt your stream.
Jess:
And he used a passphrase, I think it’s eight, 12 or 16 different digits.
Steve:
Correct. Yeah, which kind of correlates to, is it AES 128, AES 256 or AES 512. Each one gets more and more encryption to it, so that it does support different variants of AES.
Jess:
And I can say that it works great, because we had to do that with… I don’t remember the customer, but I remember we had to help him get his AES set up. I believe it was someone at Fox.
Steve:
There’s also the guys over in Europe, who were doing some European soccer games.
Jess:
That’s right, and they wanted AES encryption. So yeah, we got it working. One last question. Does the SNMP platform work with solar winds or Nagios or some other SNMP platform?
Steve:
Correct. Yeah. So let’s say the unit, once you kind of configure the D2Monitor, it will be broadcasting the status every three seconds. So if you do have some sort of SNMP aggravator, it can’t do that. Kind of develop your own view, you won’t get all the nice colorful boxes and the email. All that stuff would have to be… You’d have to develop that on your own.
Jess:
Sure.
Steve:
But as far as the data itself, is available over SNMP.
Jess:
So it’d work that way. I like this interface because like I said, if I was a chief engineer, I would have this up in master control or TOC so that whoever’s operating, or if you walk into the room, at one glance, you can see that all of your links, whether they’re coming or going, are working and happy. And so it’s really, really a great platform. I think it’s really, really, really well needed. Looking to see if there’s any other questions. Let me look through the chat here. I think we got a lot of great ones, but I think that’s it. Anyone else have any last questions? Bueller? Bueller? Oh, wait, hold on. A lot of great questions. I’m really excited. When is this available? Good question.
Steve:
Oh, it’s available now. It just kind of came live, so it still is kind of in a beta situation, but we’re definitely looking for people to come in and kind of join up for it. And as I say, we can do this. As we’re showing here, these units here have finished all tests. When I go back to One Ministries, these units are all live on the air, broadcasting. So it is actually up and running.
Jess:
Yep.
Steve:
So if anybody wants to kind of check it out, just give myself or Jessica a call and we can help get you set up.
Jess:
Cool. Yep. Awesome. Yeah. And if you’re curious about pricing, probably best bet is to give us a call. The last question that came in was about pricing.
Steve:
Correct. And that’s something, as I say, we’re still kind of finalizing everything. But if you give us a call, we’d be happy to go over that with you.
Jess:
Yeah, we’ll work it out. Yeah, definitely. For sure. It looks like that’s it for the questions. There were a lot of great questions. A lot of great comments.
Steve:
All right. Okay. It looks like, actually… Okay. All right. So any other questions? Not seeing any more come in.
Jess:
No.
Steve:
So, okay. So today, this was a really great webinar. It’s a lot of great information. Today, you learned about keeping track of all inbound and outbound streams in one spot, automating SNMP alerts and emails when it goes offline or loss of sync on an input. Identifying and resolving issues before they affect your viewers. And so it’s just a lot of really great stuff going on with the monitor. And hope everyone was able to learn something today, and please contact us if you have any more questions or would like to try out the D2Monitor.
Jess:
Thanks, Steve.
Steve:
So have a great day, everybody.
Jess:
Great webinar. Thanks everybody. Have a great day. Call me if you need anything.
