Zixi working with AWS Elemental platforms to increase support for sports broadcasters

Working with AWS Elemental, Zixi is helping sports broadcasters deliver some of the most complex video content to their viewers in mezzanine quality, from a variety of locations and venues.

An enabler of live broadcast quality video over the public internet, Zixi has announced its protocol support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaConnect.

Speaking to SVG Europe, Zixi director of product management, Tim Baldwin, said: “Sports broadcasters face the challenge that they need to deliver some of the most complex video content to their viewers in mezzanine quality, from a variety of locations and venues, and, as viewership moves towards a larger variety of cable systems and virtual multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), the complexity of delivering that content in pristine form to more and more destinations is ever increasing.”

He believes that embedding Zixi’s technology in AWS Elemental’s kit will help to solve this issue.

“The Zixi technology with AWS Elemental Media Connect allows sports broadcasters to contribute and deliver redundant, mezzanine quality video over unmanaged first mile, last mile, and backbone IP networks with the flexibility of on-demand infrastructure that sets up in minutes, not days, and easily scales from several to hundreds to thousands of cable and MPVD destinations as well as AWS Elemental MediaLive media processing workflows.

“Throughout the MediaConnect workflow, the video streams are protected against packet loss and jitter to deliver a pristine viewing experience and this technology is equally available to both large and small broadcast operations with global, national, or regional reach,” he added.

Zixi’s delivery protocol technology is now integrated with the latest release of AWS Elemental Live.

This allows customers to take advantage of Zixi’s methods of optimising IP-networks for video and configure outputs intended to deliver live video content in real time over unmanaged networks, providing a fast, secure and reliable contribution methodology for getting video content on AWS. Zixi’s technology provides a best-in-class resiliency using a combination of content-aware and network adaptive forward error correction, error recovery, congestion avoidance, bonding of multiple transmission paths and dynamic feedback to control encoder rate, all at a minimal latency.

Zixi customers also have the option to configure their outputs from AWS Elemental Live to be sent to AWS Elemental MediaConnect.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is a high-quality transport service for live video that provides users with the reliability and security of satellite and fibre combined with the flexibility, agility, and economies of IT-based networks.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect combines Zixi reliable video transport, highly secure stream sharing and real-time network traffic and video monitoring that allows users to focus on content, not transport infrastructure.

As for what’s next for Zixi in sports broadcast and with AWS Elemental, Baldwin concluded: “Zixi in our partnership with AWS Elemental MediaConnect is focusing on improving the monitoring, management, and orchestration of hundreds or thousands of content channels, to improve operational scalability and efficiency for our customers. We are adding features to such as dynamic bitrate adjustment to automatically adjust the stream bitrate to account for network congestion and AI driven content quality analysis using learned AI models to quantify and score delivered video content.”

Zixi clients include IMG, UFC and Hockey TV.