The Broadcast Bridge Discusses Zixi Low Latency Streaming Video

For the product engineers at Zixi, latency disruption depends on the use case.

“For example a live interview will require very low latencies so you aren’t seeing that “satellite delay,” latencies above 500ms will start to be noticeable to the audience,” said Naytram Deonarain, Technical Partner Manager, Zixi. “Our technology can do ultra-low latencies of 50ms if the underlying hardware can support the connection.”

In other use cases where QoE is important, he said that most broadcasters will choose a higher latency to ensure the video is of pristine quality. Zixi’s software-defined video platform (SDVP) can be leveraged to manage both of these uses cases and we provide the data for our customers to optimize their workflows over unmanaged networks.

Zixi’s SDVP has gained traction within the professional video industry and now says it has partnered with over 300+ hardware vendors “to allow our customers to have a choice when it comes to encoders. All of the major vendors support the Zixi protocol and its ability for ultra-low latency. The SDK requires very little resources allowing encoding partners to use the processing power to achieve ultra-low latencies,” said Deonarain.

Supporting the most popular compression protocols is key to Zixi’s success. Deonarain said the Zixi SDVP is both protocol and codec agnostic, and “we can transport any video signal in an MPEG-TS container whether it’s highly compressed HLS or low compression J2K. Our platform is future proof to support any format today and will be able to support 8K whenever that format becomes widely available.”

The issue of timing and synchronization came up in our discussion regarding how it can affect latency.

“Producing content with IP streams will require highly accurate timing to ensure the video streams are synchronized, and since we’re producing the content before it goes to air it’s more important to ensure the video is synchronized across cameras,” said Deonarain. “Customers can deal with some latency to ensure the content is synchronized when it comes to switching between cameras, and our customers are already adopting the SDVP to manage the transport of numerous streams/cameras in the cloud. For pre-production you’ll need some form of management to ensure all cameras are available and in-sync.”