Zixi Broadcaster v19: Keep the Feed on Air, With Fewer Boxes in the Path

When going to slate is not an option

Picture a bonded stadium uplink at peak load, running over public internet and 5G, and capacity drops mid-match. Until now there were two options, both bad: buffer and add latency, or drop quality until the channel cuts to slate. v19 adds a third, Zero Latency Frame Thinning, which sheds non-essential frames under constrained conditions while preserving key frames and audio, so the picture stays continuous and in sync at zero added latency. It runs alongside the FEC/ARQ recovery and hitless failover already in place, and full frame rate resumes on its own when the link recovers, with no interruption to the viewer.

Broadcast quality will always remain the default with Zixi. Frame Thinning is the opt-in for situations where a dropout means black: venue contribution on variable bandwidth, FAST channels protecting ad delivery, station links without a backup path.

Once the feed survives, make it useful immediately

A reliable feed is worth more if you can act on it the instant it lands. The Time Addressable Media Store (TAMS) is an open specification from BBC R&D, published through AMWA. In v19, Broadcaster writes your live streams into your own TAMS store as time-stamped segments, media and metadata together, backed by object storage such as S3.

The practical result: a producer requests the last 20 seconds of a goal by timecode and gets frames back immediately for social, with no rendering and no file pulls, while a compliance team pulls a separate window from the same store without touching the rest of the recording. Because the standard is open, you keep your store and your tooling, with no vendor lock-in. Zixi is only the live source into it.

Fewer boxes in the chain

Two more features take boxes out of the chain by keeping the work inside Broadcaster.

SPTS Multiplex combines selected PIDs from multiple SPTS sources into a single output. Pair a clean world-feed video with a local-language commentary track arriving as separate SPTS streams, remap the PIDs, and deliver the affiliate exactly the program they expect, as a single program or a full MPTS with frame-accurate interleaving. It is configured through ZEN Master or the API, adds no latency, and removes the external multiplexer or vision mixer from the path.

HLS Normalization applies the same idea upstream. Partner HLS feeds arrive with segment discontinuities, burstiness, and inconsistent timelines that break ad insertion downstream. v19 repairs PCR, PTS, and DTS irregularities, handles discontinuities, re-multiplexes, and cleans SCTE-35 markers. The output is broadcast-grade MPEG-TS with the granular SCTE-35 control that ad systems depend on, native to the workflow instead of bolted on ahead of it.

Density that changes the economics

For RSNs, cable operators moving to IP, and headends constrained on space and power, the viability of a high-channel-count build often comes down to channels per rack unit. v19 adds native NETINT VPU support, ASIC-based HEVC and H.264 transcoding at up to 10x the channel density of CPU encoding, selectable alongside the existing software and NVIDIA GPU paths. VPU acceleration is currently available on Akamai Connected Cloud and on-prem with the NETINT VPU cards. For many satellite-replacement projects, that density decides whether the build is economically viable, or not.

The encode path itself also gets richer. HTML-based overlays with audio run directly in the software and NVIDIA GPU paths, so a live scoreboard or sponsor graphic is burned in with no second pass and no separate graphics tool. Chroma and color-depth coverage expands as well, up to 4:2:2 10-bit on the software path and 4:4:4 on NVIDIA GPU for premium and HDR destinations.