We built a footage clip sharing system on a cloud environment for five Tokyo commercial broadcasters to support the “Lausanne Winter Youth Olympics.”

We have been building compliance recording systems and TS monitoring systems at individual broadcast stations for many years. However, when integrating at a scale of approximately 100 stations nationwide, a variety of new challenges arise that differ from conventional deployments.

For example, the following challenges can be identified:

• Visibility and operability issues regarding how users access each station
• How to consolidate and display alarms generated from multiple devices
• Bandwidth challenges related to smooth network-based access
• Cases requiring travel time to stations, and handling unmanned stations after evening hours
• Preparedness for the possibility of system outages during large-scale disasters
• Optimization of deployment costs
• Building a maintenance support system for nationwide scale

Addressing each of these challenges one by one, we worked toward the optimal system architecture.

※ Compliance Recording: A system that retains broadcast content aired by the station for at least three months, as required by the Broadcasting Act.
※ Monitoring: A system that monitors whether broadcast signals comply with standards such as ARIB.

This system allows simultaneous playback of sources recorded at multiple points (BASEBAND, ENC OUT, MASTER OUT1, AIR, etc.), all in a synchronized state. It also supports delay adjustment, enabling field-by-field and frame-by-frame review using step-forward and step-back controls.

For example, sources at each stage of the signal chain, such as SDI → TS → AIR, can be compared and reviewed all at once.

• We needed to temporarily install a receiving antenna and observe long-term radio wave propagation variations (interference from structures, over-sea/mountain/seasonal propagation, etc.) from a medium-to-long-term perspective.

In recent years, rapid subtitle broadcasting during large-scale disasters and other emergencies has been established as a government policy guideline. Depending on the disaster situation and time of day, securing sufficient staff may become difficult.

For this reason, building a system capable of delivering services with a small, in-house team had become a key challenge.

We used LiveShare for live broadcast programs, including the “Matsue Suigosai Lake Fireworks Festival” held in August 2022.

We were operating a workflow to distribute video to multiple destinations via SRT communication (AWS MediaConnect).

In doing so, there was a need for remote team members to visually verify video feeds and monitor multiple streams, and an environment capable of viewing video with low latency was required.

As the number of streaming business projects grew, we were searching for a streaming monitoring solution. At the time, we were looking for a solution that could address the following three challenges:

1. Video monitoring capability
2.  Simple video availability monitoring capability
3.  SCTE information display capability

However, the market was dominated by high-feature, high-cost foreign products, and we could not justify adoption from a cost-effectiveness standpoint.

For the co-play sports betting service “TIPSTAR,” we were exploring solutions for multi-view monitoring and monitoring automation.

TIPSTAR has built its own nationwide network to simultaneously transmit video and audio from keirin (bicycle racing) and auto racing tracks across Japan to Tokyo. As a result, we needed to constantly monitor transmission status and signal integrity.

Before implementing MediaHarbor, we connected multiple coaxial inputs to multi-view monitors, converted them to IP streams, and then had staff manually monitor video and audio.

The following operational challenges had been identified:

1. No flexibility in changing input sources or screen layouts, requiring physical on-site work
2. Wanted to automate video/audio availability monitoring
3. Difficult to integrate with other systems via API or automate operations

We had also considered overseas products, but they presented challenges in terms of cost-effectiveness and operational usability, and we had not proceeded to full-scale adoption.