NAB Show New York Welcome & Five Key Trends by Zixi

Video Transcript

Hello, and welcome to NAB Show New York. We’re excited to bring you this all new experience designed to bring the media and entertainment industry together to restart, re-engage, and refocus our businesses. You represent the heart of the media industry. You’re the visionaries, the disruptors, and entertainment professionals pushing the boundaries of content every day. And you bring a unique energy and enthusiasm, trace that will serve you well as you take part in NAB Show New York, exploring exceptional content and making the vital connections that will move our industry forward.

NAB Show New York is all about networking, content, and discovery. We’ve produced exclusive programming to help you learn about new products and solutions, to stay current on industry trends, and virtually engage with like minded professionals. Also visit the marketplace to watch live demos, to take virtual tours, and to engage with exhibitors. This is an opportunity to get your questions answered via chat by these companies representing almost every vertical of the media, entertainment, and technology industries.

Now the challenge of 2020 has created opportunities to re-examine our business models and to integrate different tools and technologies so that we can create new ways to continue to thrive. This is happening across the media and entertainment landscape. But on the broadcast side, NAB and its members have been more focused than ever on investing in innovations to ensure that broadcast signals are available on every device today and in the future so that we can always be there for our communities when they need us most.

This year more than ever, our communities look to their local broadcasters to deliver the most trusted news and emergency alerts to keep them safe, to keep them informed, to keep them connected. We have provided our communities essential and fact based news on the pandemic, on a movement to write social injustice, on hurricanes, wildfires, and more. And we’re exercising our first amendment rights of freedom of speech and of the press to keep the public informed and to shine light on issues that our nation and communities face.

I’m personally looking forward to joining a panel with Gray Television’s Washington Bureau on Wednesday 10:30 am Eastern to discuss how local broadcasters are providing fact based news and hyper local coverage of Campaign 2020. And on Friday at noon Eastern, I had the honor of presenting the 2020 NAB New York Show Impact Award to Meredith Vieira for her tremendous impact on the industry. So I hope you can join me for these great events. I want to thank all our sponsors and partners who have helped us present 10 days of content and connections all customizable to your business and to your schedule.

A special thanks to Zixi, Sony Electronics, VAST Data, Vertical Bridge, and Roland. And thanks to all of you for joining us for this digital NAB Show New York. Beyond this event, we’re preparing to launch a new and innovative platform, Amplify, which will connect and inform our industry 365 days a year. You’ll be able to network, attend events, learn from experts, discover new technologies and much, much more. So stay tuned. We know many of you are confronting the challenges presented by the pandemic. So we thank you for your participation in this event.

Now it’s my pleasure to introduce the next speaker. He is the executive chairman and CEO of Zixi, and he’s going to highlight Zixi’s five key trends to watch heading into 2021. Welcome, Gordon Brooks. The virtual stage is now yours.

Welcome to NAB New York 2020. I’m Gordon Brooks, the CEO of Zixi. This should be a really exciting show and I hope to meet many of you virtually. I hope you come visit us. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Zixi for context and then talk to you about what to watch based on our research, what are the trends that we’re seeing in the market. So Zixi is a software defined video platform to manage, orchestrate, and transport live and live linear content, broadcast quality content. We’re employed by traditional broadcasters OTT providers and service providers to source, manage, and distribute the live and live linear channels that they have. We do that over any IP network. We do that over any protocol. We support over 17 protocols even though we’re well-known for our protocol, over any cloud provider and integrate with any edge device.

And our customers are content networks such as NBCU, ViacomCBS, Bloomberg, and BBC, OTT players such as Peacock, Fubo, Amazon Video, and Hulu. Carriers such as Verizon, Comcast, Telstra, and Tata. Telcos such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Charter. Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google, and Rakuten. And surf riders such as SAS, Comcast Technology Solutions, Red Bee, and Telstra. So Zixi has over 100,000 instances distributed globally around the country and over 100 around the world in over 100 countries. We have over 700 media customers and more technically integrated with over 200 technology partners. And what that does is provides an unmatched global network allowing you to take your content anywhere to anywhere.

So what is a software defined video platform? A software defined video platform has four components. It has protocols, which are key to transport but there are many different protocols out there and we support all the open source, standard based, and proprietary protocols that are commonly used. There’s a video solution stack which is the brains of the operation. The protocol does nothing on its own, it really needs the video solutions stack to allow you to do things like hit lists failover, trance coding, bonding, things like that. That is enabled with what we call the Zixi Enabled Network or ZEN. And there are over 200 partners that we have, integration partners. So you have complete interoperability.

And then ZEN Master, and ZEN Master is our control plane to orchestrate, manage, and alert on these very large complex IP implementations. So what’s new? We added a number of new protocols to get up to 17. Obviously we have Zixi but we added NDI. We just recently added risked main profile, SRT, and then we support a number of other ones like HLS, RTMP, RTP, et cetera.

We have over 200 technology partners. Some of the newer partners are Ad Insertion Platform, Blackbird Net Insight, Irdeto, TAG VS, Vimond, Red Bee Media, Telstra, and many, many more. And you’ll see technology partners, where we’re integrated into encoders, decoders, IRDs, but you also see us integrated into cloud based partners, like Blackbird and Ad insertion. Platforms, so that the workflow is Zixi enabled.

In the Video Solutions Stack, what’s new, 4K transcoding features, including logo insertion, and WebVTT support for direct to player distribution, like Samsung TVs, an improved multi GPU and video support for transcoding. And then in Zen Master, we did a whole new rewrite on our user interface. We now have PID mapping and PID normalization. We also have a number of ways to do low latency stream previewing, including WebRTC. And then also, on the Samsung TV, iOS, app, et cetera.

And then we just introduced geographic system mapping and much, much more. And we can tell you all about it, if you come see us during the show. And you can do that by visiting so at our booth. View our live demo on Wednesday the 20th, attend our 30 minute tech chat presentation on Wednesday the 20th as well, or visit us at the marketplace tour on Wednesday.

So we’ve been doing a lot of research over really, the last six months. And there’s some key trends that you may want to watch that we’ve been noticing. First off, is how just the importance of live. Live and live linear into kind of the OTT and SVOD platforms. And production and delivery of live content, it’s really hot right now, and there’s a significant rise in the importance of live and live linear content in streaming platforms.

One of the reasons is, when you don’t have it, you realize how important it is, and how much you miss it. There’s also a lot of decision and price fatigue going on with the overwhelming amount of VOD choices that you have. And so people are doing a lot more live broadcasts and live linear broadcast. So things like Peacock recently helped NBCU launch Peacock, which is live linear and gives you multiple options for viewing.

Other cases are things like the NHL, where during the playoffs we offered a number of new camera views that they could provide as options to the broadcasters. And then we’re also doing a lot with 5G, with Verizon 5G and the AWS Wavelength Zone. Things like untethered production, we’re doing a test with two roller cases that are about hip high that we rolled into the Verizon lab, had a MiFi device hockey puck size, an antenna, and we had enough equipment in there to transmit a 20 camera 4K professional sporting event, and then packed it up and rolled it out. So a lot of interesting things going on with live.

Virtualization obviously, you know, this is a big trend in our industry. And if you look at why people are virtualizing, there are some real costs advantages, but it’s typically ranked at the bottom of the priority chart, just because there are so many other important things out there. And COVID has really increased the adoption. People have long had plans to do this, it’s just that with the need to untether yourself from physical businesses and plants, it’s really kind of sped things up.

And all the research we’re doing is really saying that the workflows that people are now able to do remotely, are providing many, many benefits. And when we finally deal with this COVID-19, most of those workflows will stay virtual. And so when you think about virtualization, it’s by definition software defined. It’s scalable. It’s data driven, because you need atomic levels of telemetry, especially if you get into large scale IP implementations like we do with some of our clients that have 3000 live streams going on Zixi.

At the end of the day, everything we’re doing is about quality of experience. And so this is driving all that we do with virtualization. And then the other important thing is to make sure that your future proof. And that’s one of the reasons that the Zixi software defined video platform supports 17 protocols, and any protocols that have any meaning in our industry will be supported by our platform. So that you’ll always know that you’ll be able to have your choice of what you use.

Delivery over IP. I mean, this is what Zixi does. But it is really taking off. We’ve been doing this for 13 years. We’re probably 10 years too early, but what it allowed us to do is really harden our technology, get POCed in almost every major broadcaster out there, and anybody moving content. And then do a whole bunch of technical integrations. And so for the last three years, it’s really been quite gratifying to see the industry catch up to kind of the vision we had for IP delivery. But you know, with IP delivery, you can manage thousands and thousands of streams, do it at broadcast quality, and five nines and six nines with the proper architecture.

Interoperability. That’s why we drive standards in our industry. But you don’t always have the standards you need. And they’re not always widely adopted, but you still need interoperability. And so as companies virtualize their infrastructures, that needs to be an important part of what they’re trying to accomplish. And today, sometimes we don’t have full control over the content we receive, or the content format, or protocols required for the content that we distribute.

And because of that, you really need to have flexibility and ability to do things like protocols switching, and things like that on the fly. So the idea with Zixi, is we have what’s called a universal gateway. We’re all software defined. So there’s no hardware in our term gateway. But that is our ability to use any IP network and any protocol from any edge device as a universal gateway to contribute to our platform, or to distribute from our platform. So again, interoperability and future proof is really a focus of what we’re trying to do.

Innovation Is always something that the industry is trying to look at. I think trade shows are a great opportunity to do that, and look to the future of broadcast technology. Some of the key ones we’re seeing are 5G and machine learning. 5G is very interesting, because a lot of people don’t think about it. They think about it for the consumer side of the equation, but the B2B movement of content over 5G is here.

We’re doing production pilots right now with major broadcasters, a partnership with Verizon and AWS Wavelength Zone, and the first workflow that we’re going to put into production is distribution, which is a satellite replacement distribution workflow. And that will probably go into production in this quarter. So this is not six months out or a year out, or two years out, but it’s here today, and the results are really quite amazing.

We’re also doing a lot with machine learning, in terms of quality scoring. And in doing predicting encoder quality for example, without looking at source video, using machine language and alert correlation, and many, many other things we’d love to talk to you about.

So welcome to NAB New York 2020. Thank you for listening. Enjoy the show. And come visit us or request a meeting. Thank you.