Zixi Press Release

XL8 Integrates Zixi, Enhancing Global Reach of Content

Posted March 29, 2023

WALTHAM, Mass., March 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Zixi, the industry leader for enabling cost-efficient and highly scalable live broadcast-quality video over any IP network or protocol and provider of the award-winning SDVP, today announced a partnership with XL8 that has integrated Zixi into their innovative LiveSubs translation engine to create real-time subtitles powered by its proprietary state-of-the-art AI technology. LiveSubs allows customers to take their Zixi stream and generate live subtitled languages on the fly, from the source language into over 70 global language pairs.

Media companies are under increasing pressure to meet the worldwide demand for hyper-localized translated media in the live distribution space and XL8 takes AI-powered machine translation, specially optimized for media content, to the next level. Its advanced technology allows significantly more efficient workflows by providing in-line editing, automated media transcription with time coding, automated subtitling, synthesized voice dubbing, real-time meeting interpretation including a soon-to-be-released Zoom app, and live subtitling. XL8’s uniquely specialized translation engines have been built from the ground up utilizing professionally trained, human-perfected subtitles curated from the media industry’s top content producers. LiveSubs creates subtitles for Broadcasters and Live streams in real-time powered by proprietary state-of-the-art AI technology.

The LiveSubs Zixi integration means that no additional conversion point is required, and streams can be ingested in real-time in order to take advantage of XL8’s AI-trained engine. This is essential to the subtitle application as low latency is one of the key requirements. Leveraging the bandwidth efficiency and reliable delivery included with the integration, users can offer subtitling services to a wider global audience. Customers using XL8’s LiveSubs can accept as well as broadcast streams from Zixi enabled live sources and to Zixi Broadcaster target destinations allowing users to deliver streams at ultra-low latencies with greater bandwidth efficiencies, safely and securely over the internet with dynamic FEC and ARQ combining to ensure smooth delivery over lossy networks. Users can receive an existing Zixi stream and feed it to XL8’s LiveSubs engine to generate live subtitle streams for new and existing markets, monetizing content in markets where the source language is not commonly spoken and facilitating an extended reach in markets where having subtitles can increase the scope of an event and generate interest from sponsors.

With integrated Zixi protocol support, XL8 customers have access to the industry-leading performance, efficiency, security and reliability that the Zixi SDVP enables. XL8’s media processing engine connects to Zixi Broadcasters, leveraging the market-leading Zixi protocol, unlocking valuable features that operations have native access to, including market-leading network efficiency.  The Zixi protocol delivers error-free video, compresses null packets, typical in broadcast streams, and is also video aware removing repetitive packets resulting in 30% to 50% lower bandwidth requirements on the network pipe, including a similar reduction in egress costs. Zixi Protocol supports stream bitrates up to 5Gbps, including jumbo frame support and is 3x more efficient than any other market offering so compute costs and energy consumption are greatly reduced, and support for ARM Processors realize an additional 50% of the cost and energy consumption of other compute processors. Zixi supports ~0ms latency with proprietary and tuned congestion-aware FEC that can be used to achieve latencies as low as transit time with no additional latency for the protocol. The Zixi protocol provides the ability to adjust latency in real time without impact on production streams and is automatically lowered when all network conditions and QoS health signals are amenable. Zixi has a connection handshake which multiplexes all streams onto one user-definable input port, and one definable output port that simplifies firewall setup and reduces complexity by 10x.

The Zixi ZEN Master control plane is integrated to enable users to manage large-scale configurations and orchestrate, analyze, monitor, and report on live video streams including XL8 deployments, and the Zixi Enabled Network of customers, integrated hardware and software applications, platforms and service providers standardized on Zixi. Complex workflows mandate advanced visibility, and Zixi provides insight into packet recovery on the sending side while including per-PID delivery on the receive side. Live content quality analysis, including ePSNR/eVMAF scores, impairments detection like frozen video and silent audio, TR101-290 measurement and the widest range of live and trending KPIs help operations teams understand the health, quality and performance of their live events and linear channels.

“Zixi is the market leader for the delivery of live IP video,” said Janice Pearson, SVP Sales & Strategy, XL8. “With this integration, our joint customers are able to further monetize their content with highly accurate subtitles and translations for global audiences.”

“Zixi’s reliability, reach and global footprint helps our customers and partners provide a better quality of service to subscribers and reach a global audience,” said John Wastcoat, SVP Alliances and Marketing, Zixi. “This partnership with XL8 is a great example of how the Zixi Enabled Network connects the world of media.”

For more details and to book a meeting please visit Zixi at NAB 2023 https://zixi.com/zixi-at-nab-2023/

About Zixi

Zixi provides the cloud based and on-premises Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) that enables reliable broadcast-quality video delivery over any IP network, any protocol, any cloud provider and any edge device. The company offers technologies for broadcasters, enterprises, over-the-top video providers, and mobile service providers around the world.  Zixi simplifies building and managing congestion-aware live video routes on any network, with support for 17-protocols across any operating environment, with products that are purpose built to provide market leading performance, universal interoperability and an operational control plane that simplifies management and orchestration at scale. With 15+ years of innovation and expertise, the Zixi Enabled Network has grown to over 1000+ media customers and 400+ OEM and service providers that deliver 20,000+ channels daily, with 110,000 deployed instances in over 120 countries, gathering over 9 billion data points a day while deliverin g over 100,000 live sporting events a year. This powerful ecosystem of the largest media organizations in the world exchanging live video allows for the creation and acceleration of new content acquisition, business models, and opportunities to reduce cost and generate revenue. www.zixi.com

About XL8

XL8 was founded in 2019 by technical executives from Google and Apple, both with an advanced degree in Computer Science from Columbia University. A Silicon Valley tech company at its core, XL8 takes AI-powered machine translation (MT), specially optimized for media content, to the next level. Its advanced technology allows significantly more efficient workflows by providing: in-line editing, automated media transcription with time coding, automated subtitling, synthesized voice dubbing, real-time meeting interpretation, and live subtitling. XL8’s uniquely specialized translation engines have been built from the ground up utilizing professionally trained, human-perfected subtitles curated from the media industry’s top content producers. XL8’s “secret sauce” offers media focused translation accuracy that is up to 40% higher than other generally available MT services. Since its inception, XL8 has surpassed translating 800,000 hours of content and more than 1.6 billion words, and currently supports more than 77 tier 1 language pairs.

For more information, contact:
Season Skuro, +1 818 903 8205 / seasons@bubbleagency.com (USA)
Shawn Belluigi, +44 (0) 7754 553 798 / shawnb@bubbleagency.com (UK)