Zixi’s Early Bet on IP Delivery Bears Fruit in Strong IBC Showing

Partnerships with powerhouses like Imagine Communications, Harmonic, Cisco

Over the past half decade, the sports-video industry has become more comfortable with using IP to handle the movement of video behind the scenes. Zixi, a company specializing in delivering video over IP for live-streaming experiences, however, has long championed the technology for use at the most critical juncture in the video process: distribution.

Despite having a rather unassuming booth location in the popular Hall 14 at the RAI in Amsterdam this month, Zixi was one of the breakout stars at IBC 2017. One of the emerging leaders for IP transport, Zixi has put itself in a position as one of the go-to companies in the burgeoning field of live-streaming sports.

“This application, service, technology, and protocol is becoming mainstream,” says Israel Drori, president/founder, Zixi. “In IP delivery, the fact that some people might struggle shows that you have to know what you are doing. Big names are working with us.”

Don’t mistake this for an overnight sensation, however. Zixi has been working for years on proving the technological reliability and the economic value of IP.

“[IP-based] contribution can be backup or primary, and there’s a lot of ways to do that,” says Eric Bolten, VP, business development, Zixi. “But the distribution carries the payload. That’s the money. For broadcasters really to make the cutover to their financial bread and butter, that’s a big deal.”

At the IBC Show, Zixi expanded its partnerships, with two huge companies in media delivery: Harmonic and Imagine Communications. The goal in both cases is to work toward completely virtualized television operations and to deepen their development efforts focusing on broadcast-quality live IP video platforms and further integrate broadcast-industry standards and safety protocols in hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Zixi’s work has caught the attention of many major media companies, including Comcast/ NBCUniversal, Discovery, Viacom, and Bloomberg.

This month, Zixi took another significant step when it announced the Zixi software platform’s full compliance with the industry-standard MMT (MPEG Media Transport).

MMT, developed by the MPEG industry workgroup to support the emerging need for highly dynamic signal transport, accepts media coding without restricting or specifying how it is encoded.

It essentially gets media companies closer than ever to a true glass-to-glass distribution model that can cover everything from Ultra HD, 3D, interactive content, and user-generated content. It also opens the door to many opportunities on the digital platform side with multi-device presentation, subtitles, picture-in-picture video, and multiple audio tracks.