Fox turns to Zixi for delivery of affiliates to vMVPDs

Fox Corporation has tapped technology outfit Zixi to provide its video-over-IP technology for the initial delivery of channels from its 190 local affiliates to virtual MVPD partners across the US.

The Zixi Broadcaster for broadcast quality live video delivery and ZEN Master and the Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) for system management, orchestration and monitoring have deployed as part of the workflow.

Fox affiliates use Zixi to transmit the streams to Zixi Broadcasters hosted in AWS that provide the option to transcode each stream into the appropriate format before egress to the MVPDs. They take advantage of the Zixi ZEN Master integration of the TAG Multiviewer where users feed sources into the TAG layouts and send those mosaics to desired targets enabling unified control and simplifying operations, according to Zixi.

Additionally, Fox utilizes a single control plane in Zixi ZEN Master with the IDP powered by advanced AI and ML analytics with features such as Auto Incidents utilizing Multi-Object-Correlation-Analysis (MOCA) that performs root cause analysis (RCA) for the quick resolution of issues, according to the tech company.

The recent release of v17 of the Zixi core software was designed to improve processing capacity, requiring 80% less compute as well as helping reduce transport stream egress cost by up to 50%, according to Zixi.

“Zixi has been a very collaborative partner in helping us design and implement our broadcast affiliate contribution workflow, and their ZEN Master product gives us excellent visibility into the health of the system. Choosing Zixi has undoubtedly contributed enormously to us meeting our rollout timeline,” said Alastair Hamilton, SVP Distribution Engineering, Fox Corporation.

“At scale IP and cloud-based workflows like Fox, with a few hundred channels quickly become thousands of streams. We have many clients at this capacity and much larger, and there really is no alternative in the market that can provide 99.999%+ reliability at scale like the SDVP with ZEN Master,” said Gordon Brooks, CEO, Zixi.