How to Maximize Observability in Remote Streaming Pipelines
Cloud and remote production workflows have changed the game for live streaming, enabling significant CapEx and OpEx reductions, making it possible to achieve the same results with smaller and more efficiently deployed and largely off-site crews and reducing hardware footprints. But do all of the gains in operational efficiency that remote and distributed production provide come at the expense of real-time observability? It definitely brought new challenges on that end, according to Telestream director of product management Ken Haren, who explores these challenges and changes in best practices for software-defined observability and live-stream diagnostics that have come with the shift to remote production in this discussion with Zixi SVP of business development Emeka Okoli and Eyevinn Technology media solution specialist and VP of sales and business development Magnus Svensson at Streaming Media Connect 2026.
Prioritizing Observability and Reliability
Svensson wonders how Haren ensures that with the diversity of locations, Telestream still has observability and reliability in the pipelines?
Haren replies, “I think one of the things that we saw was that you had remote control cameras and you had Zixi with really sophisticated ways to bond cellular connections and have hitless failover into the cloud. And now I’ve got a reliable way over the internet to get my content into a cloud production facility. And isn’t that cool? I can spin up. I have unlimited storage. I have unlimited compute. I can just go for it.” However, “you still needed somebody to shade cameras, for example. I’ve got multiple cameras at the venue. If they don’t have that tool set on-prem, is it being replicated in the cloud? Do I have that capability? A lot of times as people have moved away from these purpose-built video solutions into maybe more of a COTS [commercial-off-the-shelf] world where I’m looking at log files and I’m dumping everything into my big data lake and that’s my visualization on how things are working, that doesn’t really work for a lot of the things that are needed for a live production.”
How Remote Production Has Changed Workflow
Haren noticed “a quick rush to engage both for live producing more live events as well as capturing those live events for production of, for example, halftime shows and highlight reels and so forth. All that was well-suited for enabling in a remote production environment, but lacked a lot of that observability, and we see a lot of customers coming back to that.” He’s looking for answers to questions such as, “Can I spin up a dynamic multi-viewer and get real-time visibility into the health of all my streams? And not just, can I see them, but if there is a challenge, do I know what that challenge is? Do I know where it’s being introduced?” In remote production, he says, there’s a lot of finger-pointing when something goes wrong, due to “so many hops between that camera and my production team.” It used to be easier to find the single cause of what went wrong.
“And that’s where the observability comes in,” he continues. “Being able to—in a software-defined way, in an agile way—spin up monitoring across your production and be able to really analyze and understand at a really deep level what’s happening at that handoff point is vital.” Then “I’m making changes at the venue or I’m making changes in my network settings, etc. And I can immediately see those impacts, but it’s not just me seeing that. I can share that with the other vendors and other partners that are part of this distribution,” Haren says. “Being able to do that dynamically has been something that’s … pretty recent—at least at scale and with the detail that most of these productions require—but it just unlocks a higher degree of comfort with moving more of the production into a remote domain when I have robust observability around it.”
Collaborated Observability Is Key
“I think we’re kind of coalescing around something important here, which is the new technologies and advancement certainly has driven the importance of collaborated observability,” Okoli chimes in. His questions include: “So how do you share the same visual across many teams? How do you actually have that visibility or gain access to that visibility in real time? How do you get alerted across those multiple hops, as [Haren] put it? My content’s left with the correct fidelity from point A, but it may not arrive with the expectation on quality that you expect [at point B]. Something happens in between. So how do you determine that?”
Zixi is focused on these answers, Okoli notes, and collaborated observability “drives the interop and standards because everybody might use different tools, might use different protocols, different transmission mediums, [or] they might cut across all the way to the other side.” Making sure everyone can gain access to that observability is important, he says.
“Telestream is one of our partners, so we make sure we can bring all that information, all the stats to their equipment that’s then virtualized on our platform for our customers to make sure that they can jump on and gain access to the same visual,” Okoli shares. AI or automation can help with the number-crunching and provide real-time alerts, he says, “because in some cases in the creative environment, this is happening live in the real world and you want to track this as it goes along.”
Join us August 11–13, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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