Zixi reveals partnership with Gigcasters for Hydra Live

Video over IP specialist Zixi announced that digital distribution and content monetisation company Gigcasters has integrated Zixi into the Hydra Live encoder and decoder to enable live video delivery over unmanaged IP networks at bitrates lower than standard fibre transport. Gigcasters has also added support for Zixi ZEN Master for the simple configuration, orchestration and monitoring of the devices and appliances that are part of the Zixi Enabled Network. With ZEN Master, media organisations can extend their reach, increase production speed and reduce operational costs.

Gigcaster Hydra Live is a turn-key live video acquisition and contribution platform that provides the features, resiliency, and quality that professional broadcasters demand in streams at up to 4K resolution. Designed to capture, encode, and deliver live video content in real time, the software encoder and decoder cores allow for new features with easy updates.

The Zixi integration provides content-aware and network adaptive forward error correction, time-controlled error recovery and on-the-go bitrate adaptation for a best-in-class quality of service.

“Zixi is the recognised market leader with well over 500 customers deployed in over 100 countries,” said Casey Charvet, CEO Gigcasters. “With their experience, innovation, quality and security, this integration gives our customers the ability to provide broadcast quality video and reliability, even when other options like satellite are off the table. This is of huge importance in the disrupted media landscape.”

“The software defined core of Hydra Live is much more forgiving and flexible than many hardware-based offerings,” said John Wastcoat, SVP alliances and marketing Zixi. “This makes it ideal for interoperable transport with other Zixi Enabled Network software-based offerings giving our mutual customers the upmost flexibility in expanding their workflows. We are very excited to add Gigcasters to the ecosystem.”

The Zixi integrated Hydra Live platform will be demonstrated in the Zixi Partner Village at IBC in Amsterdam, 13-17 September. Zixi is exhibiting on booth 4Q3-09 at Broadcast Asia this week at Suntec Singapore.