Zixi’s Eric Bolten talks with KitPlus TV about the increase in demand for the Zixi Software-Defined Video Platform to enable remote workflows and facilitate live video editing on the fly with its newest partners, Vimond and Blackbird.
Zixi’s VP of Business Development, Eric Bolten, is featured in the debut episode of KitPlus TV to discuss how the streaming landscape has been affected by the COVID-19 lockdown. KitPlus TV is a weekly show based on the KitPlus Magazine format with industry journalists, students, news and guests in four sections reflecting the newest developments in the workflow of the broadcast media industry.
In this interview, Eric Bolten discusses how Zixi continues to push and define the Software-Defined Video Platform that allows distribution, monitoring and management of broadcast-quality, live video over any IP network, any protocol, any cloud provider and any edge device. In the face of the current pandemic, many media companies have been forced to quickly adopt remote monitoring and operational workflows to maintain broadcast continuity, which has led to a shift towards virtualization of workflows and an increased reliance on cloud-based infrastructures.
Bolten describes how lately there has been more and more demand for cloud-based live editing platforms used for post-production in the live news environment. Zixi allows editors to acquire broadcast signals and bring them across the cloud into a virtualized control room environment from which editors can monitor, manage, and orchestrate the streams using the ZEN Master control plane, ensuring stream quality for rapid turnaround of cloud-based live editing of broadcast-quality streams. Recent cloud-based editing platforms, Vimond and Blackbird, have joined the Zixi Enabled Network of over 200 integrated technology and service provider partners, and are frequently relied on by live production teams for the rapid creation and deployment of live video clips to a variety of media platforms.
Bolten explains the advantages of being software-defined “In a software-based world, it’s [about distributing] software keys and licenses. We’ve been able to spin up and get instances up and running in a matter of hours. With all of our partners, all of the interoperability connections are there, for cloud-based instances whether its AWS, Azure, or Google, these connections happen in a matter of minutes not even hours… Zixi has been virtualizing for over a decade, being able to set these up and allow different feeds coming in so that directors, producers and executives can see streams from home and that the engineers and operators can participate virtually from the control rooms, this is a big breakthrough.”
