Doing more with less

Migration to IP, cloud optimisation and artificial intelligence can significantly aid media organisations of all kinds

Sponsored editorial

In the current cost-cutting environment, amid a worldwide push for corporate profitability, the economic benefits of delivering broadcast-quality video over public internet are undeniable.

Zixi’s Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP®), powered by the Zixi protocol, boasts a proven global footprint, delivering, orchestrating and monitoring live and live-linear video that’s trusted by broadcast media and live sports organizations around the world.

While the SDVP supports a broad set of 18 industry protocols, with more than 15 years of time-tested experience, research and development, the Zixi protocol is the most widely deployed, with an 80% market share according to an independent Rethink TV research report.

Providing a secure, reliable, ultra-low-latency transport stream delivery, the Zixi protocol’s network-agnostic bonding for contribution, and patented hitless failover for delivery, enable multiple networks to seamlessly create the most robust livestream transport.

The Zixi protocol uses an AI-optimised algorithm to balance between error correction overhead, latency targets and real-time network conditions, delivering flawless transport of livestream content.

It automatically optimises egress efficiency with null and repeat packet compression, resulting in 50% lower contribution bandwidth requirements and egress costs for delivery.

A feature not found in other transport stream options is automatic latency optimisation based on real-time network conditions.

While other protocols require a fixed latency target, the Zixi protocol will find the lowest possible latency for reliable delivery, adjusting over time as network conditions change.

“Media companies are being tasked with doing more with less for a strong bottom line,” says Zixi CEO Gordon Brooks. “Sometimes the short-term view is to cut budgets without placing emphasis on setting yourself up to do more with less.

This takes investment, so can appear counter-intuitive – but it’s not. You may have to spend a bit first to save money.

“That applies to the move to IP, away from pricey alternatives like satellite; and the move to the cloud to virtualise everything, enabling you to try different things and scrap them if they don’t work easily or reduce capital expenditure. Note that it’s not all roses in the cloud; it can be expensive in certain areas. This must be managed.”

NINE BILLION TELEMETRY DATA POINTS

“People can get caught up in not looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO),” continues Brooks. “What is the initial cost? What is the implementation cost? What’s the operating cost?

“There are a number of areas ripe for savings; for instance, the use of advanced analytics and machine learning. Look at just one area – root cause analysis (RCA). This is a big expense for broadcast channels. On average, it costs about $500,000 a year in RCA per broadcast channel. That’s a big number.

“We’re doing multi-object correlation analytics, analysing over nine billion telemetry data points every day across all our customers. If there is an incident, meaning you might have unrecovered packets, one of your redundant streams is showing errors or is offline, we will produce that RCA by observing all the objects, correlating and determining what the incident cause was. This displays all the graphs and logs in one place, all time-synchronised for that incident. These things save you much more than you would ever spend on another solution.

“You can be blind when trying to find a fault if something goes wrong or have visibility of everything across the entire process. If there’s an issue, the system will inform you – finding where and what it is. Or if there’s a potential issue, it will use machine-learning anomaly detection to predict them before they happen.

“We support 18 protocols, so if you want to use something else, you can. The Zixi protocol is proprietary, but it’s the only service with ARQ encryption and forward error correction. We have by far the lowest latency, since you can’t get to sub-second latency without forward error correction.

“Because we have been doing this for so long, we also make it easy to manage large organisations with few people, and learn quickly. Operations and engineering costs are considerable; we’re focused on getting those costs down,” concludes Brooks.

V17 of the Zixi core software drastically improves processing capacity, requiring 80% less computing while also reducing transport stream egress cost by up to 50%. This lets clients maximise resources, minimise expenses and deliver broadcast-quality video reliably – with profound impact on the TCO of live video streaming implementations.

This sponsored editorial was first published in the Spring 2024 issue of FEED.

Zixi: Migration to IP

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