Streaming Media Spotlights Zixi’s Intelligent Data Platform

Posted May 25, 2021

Streaming Media Feature IDP

Streaming Media Magazine Features Zixi’s Intelligent Data Platform in its latest issue, explaining why the IDP is a game changer for broadcast media operations.

With broadcast media workflows increasing in complexity, combing both virtual and hardware components, and sending content across traditional and IP-based transmission pathways, how does a broadcast engineering team stay on top of workflows to make sure they’re delivering reliable, broadcast-quality video? With Zixi’s Intelligent Data Platform, such a task is easy.

This recent article from Streaming Media explains how broadcast operations teams can mitigate risk in the broadcast environment by using Zixi’s Intelligent Data Platform to monitor stream health and alert on errors before they occur.  Zixi’s Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) allows media companies to leverage advanced analytics, machine learning and AI to reduce operating and maintenance workflows. With unparalleled access to streaming workflow data, Zixi’s IDP aggregates 3 billion data points a day from across the Zixi Enabled Network and uses advanced analytics, machine learning, and Zixi’s unique video telemetry data to provide alerts based on patterns and insights from this data.

The IDP allows media companies to:

  • Provide relief for companies dealing with data operations overload, where current systems report on too many false alarms and it can be hard to tell what is and is not important.
  • Help teams be more reactive to transmission issues and allows them to conduct predictive maintenance so they can fix issues before they occur instead of after things break.
  • Conduct better Root Cause Analysis (RCA), helping operators and engineers understand the true causes of instability in failure across workflows through its many data visualizations, graphs and analysis.

 

This article was originally published in Streaming Media Magazine

Using Advanced Analytics, AI, and Machine Learning to Mitigate Risk in the Modern Broadcast Environment

The Challenge Facing Modern Broadcasters

As virtualization transforms the media industry, video workflows are intersecting in new ways every day, allowing for agile, cost-effective business models and the ability for content owners to monetize content across more platforms. With vast amounts of data being transmitted across increasingly complex supply chains, broadcast workflows have become more difficult to manage, and problems are harder to diagnose. As media organizations connect more on-prem and cloud resources together—equipment from different vendors, sources from other business units and partner organizations—and distribute to new device types, there is an ever-expanding amount of log and telemetry data. Most of this data gets ignored. Why? Broadcast engineers have more information than they can effectively process, and they often silence alerts and alarms because they are just too frequent. It can be impossible to tell what is and isn’t important, and too often that leaves them in the dark, just hoping for the best.

Advanced analytics can help with these problems—making sense of the avalanche of data, helping human operators know where to focus, and revealing where issues are likely to occur before failures are noticed. Zixi helps media companies take advantage of the unprecedented opportunity to leverage these toolsets for sophisticated event correlation, data aggregation, deep learning, and virtually limitless applications to improve broadcast workflows.

SDVP

See Problems Before They Happen with Zixi’s Intelligent Data Platform

The Zixi Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) delivers live broadcast-quality video at the lowest latency and the highest reliability over any IP network. With more than a decade of experience pioneering live video delivery using the Zixi protocol and the ZEN Master control plane, Zixi has unique insight into the dynamics of the network and how video data is transmitted.

The Zixi Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) is the culmination of years of investments in data architecture, advanced analytics, machine learning, AI, and event correlation work that enables users to oversee, manage, and deeply understand their inputs and outputs by providing ultimate visibility using learning algorithms to work with extremely large data sets and customize intelligence. While AI and ML are not novel concepts, they have been largely underutilized in the broadcast and media industries up to this point.

How Does the Intelligent Data Platform Work?

The IDP consists of a data bus that aggregates data from all Zixi endpoints, including encoders, cloud services, networks—any of the 250+ devices and systems with Zixi built in. This telemetry data is sent to Zixi’s cloud machine learning platform and fed into continuously updated models where events are correlated, and patterns discovered. The system uses historical data to form a model of normal behavior and generates an anomaly score. The IDP also uses a predictive model to determine the likelihood of unrecoverable dropped packets or stream failure within the next 2 hours—the Zixi Health Score. Both the Anomaly and the Health Scores are communicated to ZEN Master where they are shown as indicators and graphs over time.

By utilizing more than 3 billion data samples per day, Zixi’s machine learning models are constantly being trained for accuracy and consistency, continuing to improve over time as more data is aggregated across the platform. With the SDVP powering the highest value live streams in the world, the IDP has unique access to network and video quality telemetry and can leverage these and additional strengths to produce proactive data insights in a variety of ways.

Zixi Intelligent Data Platform Core Features

Zixi Health Score

  • Prediction of degraded video and lost packets during a 2-hour window
  • Prediction of offline state
  • Utilizes event correlation and a variety of data inputs to produce a tangible, numerical value
  • Continuously improving ML, based on 100 correlated measurements per source, in real-time
  • Root-Case Analysis indicators for rapid issue solution

Zixi Health Score

Anomaly Detection

  • Continuous graphs of detected anomalies per source over time
  • ML-based model learns normal behavior to identify deviations (Predictive Analytics)
  • Allows engineers to pinpoint errors faster using historical and real-time data

Historical Graphs

  • View health score, anomalies, statistics and more over time
    to identify trends

Video Content Quality

  • Silence detection
  • Clipped audio
  • Blank image
  • Still image
  • Encoding quality
  • Audio levels

Perceptual Video Quality:

  • ePSNR, eVMAF, and eSSIM

Smart Alerts

  • Real-time error detection and notification
  • Customizable alert thresholds based on your use case
  • ML-based Health score alerting

Intelligent AI-Based Protocol

  • Zixi.AI Protocol provides real time dynamic ML rate control

What Benefits Will the IDP Bring?

The IDP provides an immediate and lasting boost to visibility, productivity, will reduce operational cost and save time – while ultimately improving the quality of service delivered to consumers. With the IDP, broadcast engineers and media organizations can:

  1. Eliminate Data Overload and focus on what is important: The IDP’s intelligent alerts and health scores help sift through and aggregate data trends so that teams can focus where they need to without the distraction of false alarms.
  2. Be Predictive and Proactive: Fixing problems after system errors is costly and stressful. Predictive and proactive maintenance is conversely orders of magnitude less expensive and simple.
  3. Reduce costs and improve RCA: Engineers and broadcasters need to be able to identify the root causes of instability and failure faster and more easily.
  4. Increase Productivity: Instead of spending time and money sifting through mountains of data, the IDP efficiently identifies problems.
  5. Achieve Greater Insight and Visibility: A reactive or break-fix approach suffers from lack of oversight and is subject to mass variability and volatility. The IDP keeps ahead of errors and issues before they become problems with continuous visibility.

With the power of advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, the Intelligent Data Platform provides the transparency and control needed to guarantee reliable broadcast operation. To learn more about how the IDP can help perfect live video delivery over any IP network, please visit: Zixi – Intelligent Data Platform.