Cinedigm adopts Zixi for scaling FAST channel business

Zixi has integrated its Zixi-as-a-Service (ZaaS) with Cinedigm’s Matchpoint platform suite.

Through a diverse mix of premium SVOD services and dedicated AVOD and FAST channels, Cinedigm’s portfolio of 30 streaming channels offers premium content in a variety of genres to 90 million consumers worldwide on more than a billion devices.

Cinedigm has developed its own proprietary solution, Matchpoint Dispatch, for managing its massive library of film and television content and enriching content metadata, enforcing territorial along with platform rights, and distributing scheduling metadata associated with the content library.

Through a direct integration, Matchpoint utilises Gracenote’s programming metadata and proprietary IDs to help organise assets, aid in audience discovery and support content scheduling across major FAST channel platforms. Cinedigm’s linear playout partner originates a mezzanine Zixi-enabled master transport stream for each of Cinedigm’s channels, pushing these across geographically diverse signal paths to ZaaS.

ZaaS provides Cinedigm with real-time telemetry data, advanced network congestion, error correction management and significant bandwidth efficiency improvements over deployed legacy systems. With well-structured hierarchical entertainment feed data, Cinedigm builds programmatic playout schedules. An electronic programme guide is generated for each of over 20 channels, including defining ad avails within the programme schedule. ZaaS transcode engines create a quality optimised ABR streaming ladder packaged for distribution to the content origin servers and validates stream health and compliance with each partner’s delivery specifications.

“Zixi delivers actionable insights on the health and performance of FAST channels, enabling the operational agility we need to rapidly scale,” said Tony Huidor, chief technology & product officer at Cinedigm.  “Cinedigm has scaled to the point where we need to more directly manage distribution of our FAST channel portfolio, this partnership with Zixi makes that operationally possible and economically feasible.”

“Cinedigm needed a way to operationally manage the end-user experience,” said Peter Dawidzik, director of sales, Zixi.  “Integrating the full suite of Zixi capabilities with video-optimised cloud infrastructure, ZaaS delivers economic performance and operational efficiencies that are supporting the rapidly scaling FAST channel delivery services Cinedigm offers.”