IP Is Scaling Faster Than It’s Being Controlled

New research from Caretta Research, “Unlocking Live Video Workflows with IP,” produced in partnership with Zixi, documents what is already underway. Broadcasters and content owners are rebuilding live operations around IP delivery as satellite and dedicated fiber infrastructure decline. Organizations including Sky and the NHL are using IP contribution feeds and cloud-based master control rooms to expand coverage, support more simultaneous events, and distribute content to global streaming platforms more efficiently. The direction of travel is clear, but the underlying challenge is not simply one of adoption.

What is emerging is not a transport problem, but a systems problem.

As workflows expand across protocols, clouds, and partners, the infrastructure that once enforced consistency, reliability, and operational accountability no longer exists in a single place. Those functions have not disappeared, but they have become fragmented across the workflow, often implemented inconsistently or left unresolved entirely.

What IP Enables and What It Removes

IP delivery introduces flexibility at every stage of the workflow. Broadcasters can scale production, expand distribution, and support more partners without the constraints of fixed infrastructure. What once required dedicated capacity and long-term planning can now be done dynamically.

This flexibility is driving real operational change and real business pressure. In the US, the reallocation of C-band satellite spectrum is accelerating the need for alternative distribution approaches. In other markets, cost pressures, expanding streaming distribution, and demand for more flexible event production are pushing broadcasters toward IP-based delivery.

— Robert Ambrose, CEO and Co-founder, Caretta Research

At the same time, IP removes the structural boundaries that previously governed how workflows behaved. There is no longer a single system defining how feeds are routed, how switching occurs, how failover behaves, or how performance is validated across the full path.

Without those boundaries, workflows become more adaptable, but also more dependent on how they are implemented and managed across environments.

Why Interoperability Alone Is Not Enough

Modern live video workflows are inherently heterogeneous. Broadcasters operate across multiple protocols, cloud platforms, and distribution partners, and interoperability is required to connect them.

However, interoperability does not provide coordination.

Connecting systems ensure that video can move between endpoints, but it does not ensure that those endpoints behave as part of a cohesive workflow. In practice, this leads to fragmentation across switching logic, feed handling, and partner integrations, where each component operates correctly in isolation but inconsistently as part of the whole.

As workflows scale, these inconsistencies become more difficult to manage and more impactful to both operations and monetization.

The Shift from Transport to Workflow Reliability

Reliability in IP environments is still often framed in terms of networks and protocols. While these remain important, they address only part of the problem.

At scale, reliability is defined by how the workflow behaves end to end.

This includes coordinating multiple feeds across destinations, managing switching between asynchronous sources, maintaining consistent behavior during failover, and validating delivery across every stage of the workflow.

— Marc Aldrich, CEO, Zixi

This reflects a broader shift. Reliability is no longer a property of the network. It is a function of how workflows are orchestrated, monitored, and controlled across distributed environments.

The Emerging Requirement: A Control Layer for Live Video

As IP workflows scale, the industry is converging on a new architectural requirement.

Not additional transport capabilities, but a layer that governs how workflows operate across distributed systems.

This control layer must provide a consistent way to orchestrate workflows, enforce policy, maintain visibility, and ensure predictable behavior regardless of the underlying infrastructure. For channel owners, IP distribution is also creating new commercial opportunities, including expanding global reach, launching localized channel variants, and enabling dynamic ad insertion within IP-based workflows. Capturing those opportunities requires operational control, not just connectivity.

Without that control layer, workflows remain tightly coupled to individual systems, making them harder to scale, adapt, and manage over time.

This is the gap defining the next phase of the industry.

What This Means for Broadcasters

The transition to IP is no longer defined by the ability to move video. It is defined by the ability to operate it.

Broadcasters are scaling the number of live events they produce, the number of partners they distribute to, and the complexity of their distribution and monetization models. In this environment, the primary constraint is no longer infrastructure. It is operational control.

Organizations that can coordinate, monitor, and govern workflows across distributed environments will be able to scale more efficiently, adapt more quickly, and maintain consistency as complexity increases.

How the Zixi Platform Addresses This Shift

The Zixi Platform is designed to separate control from connectivity, enabling broadcasters to operate live video workflows as a unified system rather than a collection of components.

Zixi Broadcaster enables ingest, transport, processing, and delivery across any IP network, cloud, or hybrid environment. ZEN Master provides centralized orchestration, monitoring, automation, and control across those workflows. Together, they support up to 99.999% reliability while enabling broadcasters to optimize operational cost and agility across complex global networks.

This allows broadcasters to operate across protocols and infrastructure without introducing fragmentation, maintain a single authoritative view of the workflow, apply routing and policy decisions centrally, and deliver consistent, reliable performance at scale.

This approach allows interoperability to scale without compromising control.

Access the Full Caretta Research

Read the complete research report for deeper insights into what broadcasters are saying about the transition.