The operations-centre video wall
Dashboards & websites,
on air.
Dashcast turns any web page into a live broadcast signal – rendered, encoded, and delivered onto your broadcast IP fabric as multicast, running unattended until you say stop.
The reality
Your best operational picture is trapped in a browser.
Observability lives in Grafana, Icinga, Kibana, a NOC page – all built for a laptop, not the wall. Getting it onto the operations centre today usually means:
- ✗A mini-PC under the deskcabled into the video matrix over HDMI, one machine per tile.
- ✗A tab that freezesand a session that logs itself out overnight, with no one watching.
- ✗No redundancywhen that PC dies, the tile goes black until someone notices.
- ✗No central controlchanging what's on the wall means a trip to the rack and a keyboard.
What it is
A control plane, and a fleet of render engines.
Any URL in. A real broadcast signal out. Two parts do the work:
Render engine
Runs a real browser, encodes to air
Each engine renders a genuine Chromium browser off-screen – WebGL, video, live data and all – and encodes the frame to broadcast H.264/AAC in real time, hardware-accelerated. WYSIWYG: what the page shows is what goes to air.
Control plane
Decides, places, watches, heals
The brain and the operator's screen. Define what plays where, place it on the fleet, and monitor every output – all from one browser, with an API and audit trail behind it.
Signal flow
From a URL to the wall.
The model
Five things to know.
Sources
The pages you air
Web pages, with zoom, refresh, GPU / H.264 needs and per-source logins.
Destinations
Where it goes
Multicast, RTP, unicast, SRT or RTMP – or recorded to S3.
Formats
How it's encoded
Resolution and frame rate (1080i50 interlaced included), codec, bitrate.
Channels
What's on air
One source, on one destination, placed on an engine. Started or stopped.
Carousels
Rotate the views
Several dashboards on one channel, each held for its own dwell time.
Broadcast IP native
It speaks your fabric's language.
- Compressed contribution over IPH.264 / AAC in an MPEG-2 transport stream, as SSM or ASM multicast over RTP or UDP (SMPTE ST 2022-2).
- Rides your 2110 fabricEgress bound to the red or blue leg you choose, on the same PTP-locked network as your 2110 flows.
- Optional FECProMPEG column and row FEC (SMPTE ST 2022-1) for lossy paths.
- NMOS IS-04 / IS-05Dashcast runs its own registry, with interface bindings, so a controller places the sender on the right leg and the multiviewer discovers it.
- CodecsH.264 / AAC, with hardware VAAPI or NVENC encode; interlaced and progressive.
- Portable planExport the whole multicast layout as CSV for your routing system.
Resilience
On air until you say stop.
A PC under the desk fails silently. Dashcast watches three layers of liveness and heals itself.
Engine alive
A heartbeat from every worker on the fleet.
Stream alive
The worker confirms it is still producing its output.
Packets on the wire
A probe confirms bytes are really leaving – and match the stream's settings.
When something breaks it restarts, persistently, up to a limit you set. Failover is fence-first: Dashcast confirms the old worker is truly stopped before it starts a replacement, so a source is never doubled on the fabric. Every heal raises an alert you can acknowledge.
Scale
One wall, or a hundred tiles.
The control plane places channels across a fleet of engines – on Nomad, which is optional but preferred.
- Engine poolsCarve the fleet by capability: GPU nodes, CPU nodes, dedicated cores, priority.
- Capacity budgetsPack several streams safely onto one engine, without oversubscribing it.
- GPU renderingUp to ~15× less CPU on heavy WebGL pages.
- Grow by adding a nodeMore engines, more wall. The control plane rebalances.
Operations
See everything, from one browser.
Live thumbnails
A moving picture of every channel, at a glance.
VNC into the browser
Open the actual page that's on air – and click it, live.
Topology
The signal path, headend to engine to stream, drawn out.
Activity & alerts
A full audit trail and acknowledgeable alerts.
Versioned updates
Manage control-plane and worker versions together, across the fleet.
Roles & SSO
OIDC login, with admin and operator roles.
Automation
For the dashboards that fight back.
Some pages need a login, a click, or a tab change before they're worth watching. Dashcast runs Playwright scripts against the live browser to log in, dismiss, navigate and keep the view fresh.
Handles the gatekeepers
Single sign-on, cookie banners, a click into the right view – scripted once, then left to run.
Adapts to the stream
Scripts read the output conditions and act on them – the built-in scroll automation paces itself to the stream's frame rate.
Record
Keep a copy.
Any channel can record to S3 as rolling segments – with rotation and encrypted credentials – for compliance, incident review, or a look back at what the wall was showing.
The operations-centre wall
What changes.
Today
- ✗PCs and HDMI runs, one box per tile
- ✗Frozen tabs, expired logins
- ✗No redundancy, no failover
- ✗Change means a trip to the rack
- ✗Nothing recorded
With Dashcast
- ✓Every dashboard a broadcast source on the same fabric
- ✓Discovered over NMOS, routed to the multiviewer
- ✓Carousels rotate the NOC views; logins scripted
- ✓Self-healing, 24/7, driven from a browser
- ✓Recorded when you want it
Broadcast-grade, browser-simple
Dashboards & websites,
on air.
Self-hosted on your infrastructure. Your dashboards, on the wall, the way every other source gets there.
dashcast.tvThis page is just a web page – which means Dashcast can put it on the wall too.