For the past few years the rise of several video streaming platforms has made it easier to access digital content and live streams at our fingertips. It is fascinating to witness the upward curve of digitalization and the technology that goes into these platforms, providing users with easy-to-use seamless service. Spearheading with innovative solutions, Zixi was founded to assist companies reliably deliveringbroadcast-quality video securely over any network worldwide.
Gordon Brooks, the CEO, states that Zixi got started by developing a transport protocol that continuously optimizes video delivery, even as network conditions and traffic patterns change. Zixi has always been at the center of explosive growth in live video delivery over IP networks andworked closely with its customer and industry partners to build the Zixi Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) to orchestrate, automate, and manage complex live video distribution.
The Zixi Enabled Network of over 300 technology integrations into devices, platforms and service providers ensures interoperability throughout the ecosystem supply-chain. Zixi will continue to drive innovation that changes how live content is produced, delivered, licensed and monetized.
The Next Step
Delivering broadcast quality live video with reliable and secured over mixed networks to first and third-party destinations can be very complex. However, Zixi enables its customers, the business agility to meet the rapidly evolving commercial landscape while driving down costs through operational efficiency and autonomy are top of mind for its customers. Gordon mentions that the SDVP consolidates end-to-end video distribution into a powerful live video orchestration and control plane, intelligent data analytics plane, transport routing, and video processing layers into an easily managed and dynamically scaled solution. It is why Zixi is a trusted partner, working closely with its customers to deliver the world’s most valuable content successfully.
Solution on the Go
In its relentless pursuit of being the best, theSDVP offers significant components and the integration of its partner network:
Protocols: The SDVP orchestrates video routes built on the award-winning Zixi protocol and other industry protocols such as RIST, RTMP, HLS, SRT and more.
Video Solutions Stack: Essential tools and media PROCESSING functionality such as live transcoding and packaging, hitless failover, bonding, and more.
Intelligent Data Platform (IDP): AI/ML-based DATA PLANE enable actionable insights, streaming health predictions, anomaly detection, and incident impact analysis
ZEN Master: Cloud-based CONTROL PLANE that allows for live video orchestration, management, and monitoring at scale from anywhere in the world.
Zixi Enabled Partner Network: Universal INTEROPERABILITY with a Zixi Enabled Network of over 300 integrated technology providers.
Flawless Offerings
Gordon saysthat Zixi is hyper-focused on one thing, the successful delivery of broadcast-quality live video over any network. It has more experience doing this than any other company, and this experience is manifested in the product vision and execution.
Zixi is a trusted partner to many of the world’s leading media companies, continuously delivering over 20,000 high-value live, linear channels and thousands more live events every day. Behind that trust is Zixi’s commitment to the highest level of service and responsiveness to its customers and partners. It is routinely selected as the solution of choice due to its cost-effectiveness, deep operational expertise, product execution, innovation and commitment to always do right by its customer.
Intelligent Data Platform
Gordon knows that delivering live video over managed networks, unmanaged internet, 5G/MEC and cloud infrastructure is rapidly changing the fundamental broadcasting processes. It’s not uncommon for a single video operations team to manage dozens of sources delivered to hundreds of targets across a mix of first and third-party managed infrastructure. Live video has a very low tolerance for fluctuations in network performance and is highly sensitive to a wide range of impairments that can negatively impact distribution.
Thousands of continuously generated KPIs describe any video channel’s network, infrastructure, latency, structural, compliance and stream quality. Each may be vital to understanding a future impact or past incident; sifting through vast volumes of detailed metric data and presenting this as actionable intelligence is ideally suited to powerful AI/ML algorithms. Continuously leveraging billions of discreet data points harvested from more than 20,000 live, linear channel distributions, and trained on the collective knowledge of Zixi’s expertise has enabled the IDP to iterate increasingly accurate state predictions, incident detection, and root cause analysis. Zixi continues to expand the breadth and depth of IDP AI/ML models and is inching closer to fully automated responses and autonomous video operations.
The Intelligent Data Platform IDP is built around continuously trained AI/ML models to enhance video operations and deliver higher quality video, and consists of several orchestrated components to analyze and visualize clear and actionable information.
IDP Health Score synthesizes trending data across several key performance indicators to generate live predictive and constructs a predictive model for future stream health. As it’sscore deteriorates for a given video channel, the contributing factors are identified and presented, providing video ops the insights necessary to proactively route around potential impairments that may disrupt partner and audience distribution.
IDP Insights evaluate infrastructure and channel performance to rapidly pinpoint intermittent and anomalous behavior that is often incredibly difficult to trace. New visualization dashboards simplify the continuous iterative service enhancements that modern video operations teams desire.
IDP Incidents automatically detect conditions that likely resulted in delivery impairments. Zixi Blast Radius identifies impacted channel and infrastructure resources. Incidents reports display a time-aligned graph of the leading and trailing KPIs critical to determining root cause in an easily digestible and shareable report format, significantly reducing RCA times and improving operational efficiency.
Finally, Zixi has deployedcompute-efficient AI/ML-driven models that produce a live measurement of perceptual video quality without the need for reference frames. Estimated PSNR and VMAF standards-based video quality scores are accurately calculated and enable real-time alerts of a wide range of video impairments that disrupt the viewer experience.
The Robust Cornerstones
Gordon states that culture is what defines a company. He says, “A company can have a solid strategic outlook, and the wrong culture will eat that alive. Before Zixi can succeed in the market, we must succeed with each other, and Zixi promotes an Esprit de corps thru friendship, enthusiasm and devotion to our common cause.”
Zixi’s cultural commitments focus on:
- Diversity: Recognizing that the company’s diverse experiences, backgrounds, and beliefs ultimately engender understanding and spur innovation.
- Sustainability: Leaving the Earth better than today.
- Charity: To thank the company’s success and pay it forward for the future.
Zixi’s values and culture contribute to its number one priority: Under Promise, Over Deliver, 100% Customer Satisfaction!
The Future Awaits
Gordon states, “Our industry is changing at a breath-taking pace. When we look at analyst reports and attend industry events, we consistently see live content as a significant driver of project and budget priorities. Live content offers significant differentiation to combat the growing VOD choice fatigue we’re seeing. This is driving content owners to seek distribution of live content to a growing number of new OTT experiences, FAST Channel platforms and vMVPD services.”
Content aggregators are more flexibly negotiating carriage contracts and content rights, with late-binding ‘just-in-time’ licensing starting to take off. Zixi sees investment in new audience engagement models that offer enhanced in-venue experiences, multi-camera perspectives, and socialized interactive experiences. Interactivity, ultra-low latency and time-aligned video delivery open up massive monetization opportunities with live betting operations. Key to these exciting innovations is the ability to scale out infrastructure on-demand, so a wholesale move to private and increasingly public cloud operations has occurred.
Gordon explains, “You can see a tight correlation between the market innovations and Zixi’s product launches. The ZEN Master control plane orchestrates and flexibly manages video operations and dynamically scales out on-prem, hybrid, and cloud resources. The IDP to provide the clear and deep insights, enabling smaller operations teams to manage better a growing collection of live sources, processes and destinations while continuously iterating on greater efficiency.”
Zixi’s new ContentXchange manages customer content acquisition and transport rights, increasingly leveraging bidding and flexible content rights. Zixi latency management to support live interactive and sports betting operations. Zixi also sees sustainability exerting significant buying pressure and thinks that 2022 is the year that sustainability becomes a top customer priority. “We expect to continue to invest in these areas and are working closely with our customers and partners to bring exciting innovations to the market.”
Over the Horizon
Zixi aims to manage complex live video workflows at an exceptional pace, advancing its leadership position as the clear #1 enterprise broadcast platform in the coming quinquennial years. Gordon says, “We are taking lessons learned in the most demanding and high-value media environments into other verticals that are rapidly expanding their video communications and live distribution priorities such as government, healthcare, enterprise, house of worship, and education.”
The Proven Excellence
“Zixi’s SDVP and best-of-breed protocol extend NI’s ability to securely deliver broadcast-quality live video at scale for our customers, regardless of network, device or cloud infrastructure.”
- Tor Blomdell, Net Insight
“We have been monitoring advancements in technology to support reliable broadcast-quality content delivery over IP – and it is here. Zixi offers a complete system platform that is very flexible and at a competitive price. The flexibility allows programmers like us to offer alternative services and find ways to monetize these services.”
- Mike McCrackan, Music Choice
