On-air quality assurance:
catch the black frame before the viewer does.
Point Media Tech's on-air quality assurance moves master control from people watching the wall to the system sweeping and people responding, reducing what an on-air fault costs in advertiser make-goods, contracts and viewer trust. Scattered multiviewers and channels come together in one automated monitoring and alarm platform. From black frames and silence to signal loss, caption and loudness compliance, every incident can be located, traced and handled within five seconds.
Illustrative: Kaster View monitors many feeds at once, with live black-frame and loudness alarms
Monitoring is moving from human eyes
to machines that watch and people who act.
The bottleneck in manual monitoring is attention: a multiviewer wall lets people see every feed, but not watch them all. Channel counts keep growing while the staff watching the wall does not; an operator scanning 64 feeds at a glance is already at the limit. At 100 or 200 channels, the cost of manual monitoring keeps climbing with every channel, and so does the risk of a missed fault.
An on-air incident costs advertiser make-goods, contractual penalties, regulatory exposure and, hardest to measure, viewer trust. The real risk is late detection: a black frame, a silent audio bus or a caption error is often found first by viewers, social media or the complaints line, and the control room hears about it last.
AI vision can now reliably detect black, freeze, noise, silence, loudness violations and caption misalignment on every frame, with false alarms kept to a level the duty team can handle. At the same time, loudness rules (EBU R128, the US CALM Act), caption completeness and accessibility standards are moving toward continuous monitoring, and an annual spot-check is no longer enough evidence of compliance.
Between file QC and live monitoring sits a gap that most control rooms leave unwatched. File-based QC checks at ingest and delivery, and on-air monitoring watches the moment of transmission; a clean, checked asset can still go silent on the playout server, drift on the encoder or lose captions in transcoding. Point Media Tech links Video Inspector, Live QC and Kaster View into one monitoring chain to close that gap.
From file to stream to wall,
three products forming one monitoring chain.
- Live QC stream monitoringContinuous AI inspection for black, freeze, blockiness, silence, loudness, signal loss, and caption drift across SDI, IP, SRT, and HLS sources. Average detection latency under 5 seconds. Alerts route to Slack, PagerDuty, email, SMS, or your existing NMS — with timestamped frame captures attached to every incident.
- Kaster View multiviewerFeeds are decoded and composited on the server and delivered to the browser over WebRTC, about 130 ms from source to display. Alarms land in a queue where one card acknowledges, switches to backup and replays.
- Video Inspector automated file QCAutomated file-level QC at ingest, pre-air and pre-distribution checkpoints. Covers codec compliance, PSE flash safety, loudness range, dialnorm and captions, and emits standardized QC reports that feed MAM, traffic and playout workflows.
Frequently asked questions.
Can on-air quality monitoring replace operators watching the multiviewer wall?
It replaces watching the wall all shift: Point Media Tech's AI sweeps every feed continuously, and operators respond when an alarm fires. The system finds the fault and people judge and fix it, so the duty team is still needed.
When an on-air fault happens, how does the operator know which channel it is?
Point Media Tech's Live QC raises an alarm as soon as it detects a fault, with a frame capture, the channel and the timecode, so the operator can locate and trace it directly. How each fault class is judged, and how quickly, is listed in the fault table on this page.
Which faults and standards does on-air quality monitoring cover?
Point Media Tech's solution covers black and frozen frames, noise, silence and clipping, signal loss, subtitle dropout and EBU R128 loudness compliance. Loudness is logged continuously, which provides compliance evidence for continuous monitoring.
How is file QC different from live monitoring, and do we need both?
File QC checks assets at ingest and delivery, while live monitoring watches the signal at the moment of transmission, so each catches faults at a different stage. Point Media Tech uses Video Inspector for file-based QC, Live QC for live monitoring and Kaster View for centralized viewing; you can start at the stage with the highest risk.
Which operators is on-air quality monitoring suited to?
Operators running 24/7 with more channels than people can watch by eye, including broadcasters, OTT, IPTV and commercial-display operators. With only a few channels and a dedicated operator watching full time, file QC is a sensible first step.
Hand the monitoring shift to
the side that never nods off.
The control room shouldn't be tied to the multiviewer wall, and engineers shouldn't learn at 3 a.m. from a viewer's message that a feed is down. Point Media Tech helps broadcasters, OTT, IPTV and commercial-display operators move monitoring from headcount-bound to event-driven. Contact Point Media Tech to scope an evaluation around your current architecture.
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