Switch it up with Zixi
Posted on Mar 7, 2025 by FEED Staff
As broadcasters increasingly adopt over-IP distribution, market switching via the cloud has become an obvious – yet potentially expensive – choice. Zixi gives a rundown of its implementation of the ESNI industry standard, which reduces the cost of this essential functionality
Sponsored editorial
If you’re in Philadelphia, you’ll turn on the TV and tune into a Phillies or Flyers game – or whatever sport is being broadcast to the City of Brotherly Love and its surrounding locales. The same goes for Dodgers fans in SoCal, Knicks fans in New York City and Cubs fans in Chicago, and it’s all thanks to a process called market switching.
Primarily used to distribute live sports, market switching is “the ability to change feeds to particular regions at a particular time,” defines Alan Young, vice president of product strategy at Zixi. “Sports games tend to be localised,” he adds, suggesting that “a game between the Yankees and Red Sox is likely to be shown in the New York and Boston areas, but people in California might not be interested.” Besides catering to regional consumer preferences and physically defined fanbases, market switching also ensures broadcasters follow local rights agreements.
Now and then
To illustrate how market switching works, Young provides the following example: “A broadcaster might have 19 regional sports networks. Each one of those networks goes to a different region of the US and has teams associated with it.” Young continues: “They also broadcast 24 additional feeds called alternate feeds, and every single one of those 43 feeds go to every receiving site in the US.”
Traditionally, networks would use satellites to send and receive video signals, with an Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) performing switches from one feed to the next. “It’s done that way,” begins Young, “because the cost of satellite is independent of the number of receiving sites. You pay for what goes up to a satellite; you don’t pay for what comes down.”
Now, as the broadcast industry moves towards over-IP distribution and away from satellite, “the economics change dramatically,” Young highlights. “You don’t pay for what goes into the cloud; you pay for what comes out of the cloud. If you were to continue with the existing model, you’d have to send 25 feeds (1 region network plus all 24 alternate feeds) to every receiving site. That’s very expensive,” Young stresses – both from bandwidth charges and computing resources.
“What Zixi has done is offer the ability to make that switch within the cloud rather than at the IRD,” Young continues. “The knock-on effect of that, for a regional sports network, is a 25x reduction in computing requirements. That’s the difference between it being economically viable or not. It’s a pretty essential functionality.”
Setting the standard
Besides offering financial benefits, market switching in the cloud cuts down on electricity, providing a much more sustainable option for regional broadcasters. “Switching at the IRD literally burns 25x more electricity; it’s that simple,” Young states. That said, the IRD does a ‘pretty good job’ of making the switch as smooth as possible; “as far as the viewers are concerned, they can’t see that anything has happened,” he claims. This posed a big challenge for the developers at Zixi, who had to emulate this in the cloud.
Zixi implemented an industry standard called ESNI, which stands for Event Scheduling and Notification Interface. “What that standard does is communicate a schedule to Zixi’s market switching system – in a standardised format – followed by a set of policies. It says, ‘When you see this trigger, it means that the Yankees/Red Sox game has started, and that means the following receiving sites need to see this feed switched from this source.’” Zixi built ESNI in a modular way, allowing customers to use their server of choice.
Down the line
Besides live sport, Young foresees market switching and the ESNI standard having applications in addressable advertising. It’s a natural fit, according to Young: “If you’re going to send a different game, you can send a different advert,” tailoring both to the region at hand. “There are extensibility properties down the line. We’ve not implemented them yet, but we could do in the future,” he admits.
In the short term, Young sees cloud-based market switching as being ‘a big driver for satellite replacement’ due to its obvious economic and environmental benefits – with Zixi remaining at the forefront of this revolution in regionalisation.
This sponsored editorial was first published in the Winter 2024 issue of FEED
