I’m Andrew Reich, Vice President of Business Development at Zixi. And I want you to introduce yourself. Yeah. I’m William Todd, Head of Technology and Innovation for Nine Australia in their Total Audio Division. Awesome. So why don’t we just start? Tell us a little bit about your responsibilities, maybe a little background on Nine for those who aren’t familiar and and what your, you know, what your role is there. Sure. Yeah. So, yeah, my my background has been in audio sort of all my life. I’ve got an audio engineering background. Really passionate about technology and sort of bringing technology to people and making those workflows better for them. I was at a previous radio network in Australia for ten years then moved over to Nine. Nine itself is a beast. So there’s, there’s a, you know, three pillars in Nine. We’ve got a huge publishing division, a marketplace division, a streaming and broadcast division. And in that streaming and broadcast division, have, I guess, Stan, which is kind of like a Netflix competitor for those in the US in Australia. And that’s a really fantastic, platform. We have our sort of, on-demand 9Now, sort of BVOD platforms. We have linear TV, and we have linear radio and podcasting. And and for you, you’re focused on the podcasting. Yeah. Linear radio podcasting. That audio side of the business is where I where I specialize in focus. And, yeah, we’ve just done some some major sort of technical overhauls where we’ve centralized everything into into data centers and, yeah, just majorly changed the workflow. And we’re here in IBC to continue to find those innovations and those workflow efficiencies so that we can be, you know, producing the best and most efficient content we can for our audience. Awesome. So would love to get your perspective on how Zixi has been integrated into your workflows. Yep. You know, how you came across us and and really how it’s been able to help you so far. Sure. Yeah. So we one of our business pillars in the audio division is a syndication business. We syndicate to roughly fifty radio stations around the country, news content on the hour plus a bunch of other, talk radio content, that they can take for their stations. It’s a fantastic business. It does, it does really, really well for us. We currently use satellite distribution solely to to do that around Australia. Australia is a is a big place. It’s roughly the same size as the continental US. So it’s a it’s a big, vast place. And it hasn’t got a major population as well. So there’s a lot of remote areas where, you know, perhaps connectivity isn’t so great. So satellite’s done us really well for the past twenty years. We’ve recently done a bit of a refresh there, and we came across Zixi. Again, we just do periodic research on bits and pieces and where trends are heading in in the future. We’re implementing Zixi as a companion to satellite at the moment, but eventually a replacement for our satellite distribution. So we are able to really reap all of the benefits that previously we’ve, you know, there have been limitations as far as an IP delivery platform. But we’re also able to leveraging the, you know, the platform, be able to do things like revise how we build, you know, revoke content, put specials up for specific things. It also means now we have a really good platform for distributing video as well, not only audio, which is great. So, we’ve been using that effectively as a really great transition tool for us, but also as an internal distribution tool, outside broadcasting tool as well. So Zixi has helped you so far with your distribution. Yeah. Absolutely. So it’s it’s a fantastic platform. Honestly, I sort of discovered it by accident doing some research on on what alternatives could be for that syndication model. And I came across it and started to, I guess, do a bit of a deep dive into what made that different to other offerings out there. It obviously aligns with our approach. We didn’t want to go out and buy a bunch of bespoke hardware. That was something that was just not on the table. And that’s been a philosophy of ours where a commercial off the shelf buyer, we don’t buy custom things. So we do a lot of integration with things like Stream Deck, hypervisors, containerized software. Zixi fit really nicely into that. So it’s, it’s a semi hosted for us. We have a contract through the AWS Marketplace, which is fantastic. So, we’re able to add that to our existing AWS tenancy. And then we have some o- prem and some off-prem Broadcasters, that we run both in our hypervisors on-prem and also in EC2s in AWS. So it gives us the diversity that we needed without actually physically going and buying any hardware. And would you say, you know, I love the story about how you, you know, you were doing your own research. You came across it. You acquired it through the Marketplace. Would you say, you know, the the setup and, you know, integrating the Zixi technology was fairly flexible and seamless? Yeah. I I I must say, I mean, I I I originally think I put something on the website and then obviously guys going through a bit of a transition and I I realized that we could something we could get on the AWS Marketplace. So I instantly sort of gravitated there and started getting things going. Shout out to Raj, one of the the customer support guys. He’s been very helpful in providing some information. But before I’d even gotten to the point of speaking to him, I’d actually already gotten a working system set up because the documentation, the installation guides, and the way it was structured was so intuitive. So before I actually ever got to speak to someone at Zixi, we had a working Zixi broadcast system, which was very, very cool. Not something that you can say for most other products. Most other products you really do need to sit down and work out what’s under the hood and what the integration is gonna look like. The documentation just happened to be so good that it was something that we could single-handedly go and implement. And other customers can do. So the the setup process for you all was was fairly seamless? Very straightforward. Like anything, there there’s a little bit of a learning curve depending on what your particular use case is. Ours was multiplexing, some issues that we had to sort of work out there, but a very intuitive, multiplatform. And the documentation was thorough enough that I could feed it into an LLM. We use Gemini and have Gemini spit out to me pretty much all the information I needed to be able to proceed. And that was really, really, really great. Awesome. So, so far, you know, so you got Zixi implemented, integrated so far, what have you, what have you liked and enjoyed about it? What, I guess, with that, what, there been any new opportunities or new ideas that it’s unlocked for you and your team? Yeah. So it’s early days for us in Zixi at the moment. There it’s something that we’re thinking about as we go to add more integrations. We’ve actually been talking to a few other vendors here at the show about whether they’re gonna support Zixi. It’s an option for us for our outside broadcasting technology as well. We do some distribution there that we would like to simplify. So it’s opened up a few opportunities. Obviously, the syndication one is our MVP at the moment. That’s something we’re really keen to get rolled out and really have that visibility over who is taking what. As you know, with a satellite distribution system, there is some commands that you can send out to sort of make remote control, but there is no feedback from the client. So you have to sort of, I guess, believe that potentially what you’re sending there is getting there at a good quality and is getting, you know, there to the appropriate customers. So with Zixi, the ability to have the feedback to go, I can see which decoders are online. I can see which channels they’re taking. I can see how many hours that’s been up. I can see the statistics of what they can actually use. Like, that has been a huge help for us means that we can start to be a little more, I I guess, advanced in how we would troubleshoot. So potentially we can identify issues before the customers do, and we can look to fix those issues or potentially go to the customers and give them advice on how they might improve their connectivity based on what we’re seeing. Something that we’ve been just unable to do in the past. And now that that’s that’s great feedback. Appreciate that. We we talked a little bit about too, you know, you’re you’re doing a lot with with podcasts and radio. Yeah. What about kind of integrating in the video space? Would you say that’s an area as well that maybe this can help do more with that? Absolutely. And I know there’s couple of people from our video team that are out here and they’ve been talking about Zixi as well. And they’re obviously looking into those integrations for us. You know, they’re sort of video first audio second, as far as their methodology, where audio first video second, as sort of ours, or at least video in the context of audio. Where we see benefit is around that distribution and getting that, places that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. So things like, you know, when it comes to sporting events or potentially the Olympics and things of that nature, even into site connectivity between sporting events, we’re going to have a much better, robust way of getting live video to and from places that we just didn’t have before. And we’ve used contribution methods before. We’ve obviously used Dejiro LiveU, other other things of that nature. Zixi gives us the ability to to orchestrate that quite well without having to tie up resources back at our studios. And that’s something that I think is going to become part of our natural workflows as we approach projects going forward. That’s great. Anything else you want to add? Future opportunities maybe you can help unlock? I know we got into that a little bit, but if there’s anything else you’d like to add. Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to say. Obviously, like any product, it evolves as customers sort of you know, push for things. I’m really big on being fairly vocal with vendors around where we see benefits and where we see limitations so that they can focus development in those areas. You know, as far as distribution goes, obviously adoption is really important standards. Obviously jumped on the 2110 bandwagon quite early. We’ve been running AES67 sort of at our sites for a number of decades at this point. So we like mass adoption and we like standardization. Obviously, Zixi becoming integrated with a lot of those standards and also being multi codec acceptable as well is something that’s really good for us in the future and things that we can chat to other vendors about around how we use this as a tool to solve problems that we might have integrating different platforms. Awesome. Yeah. That was great. I don’t know if you had anything else to add. No, thanks for having me. It’s been really great at the show. I appreciate all the the staff sort of, you know, answering our questions and helping us out. Yeah, we’re really looking forward to continuing partnership. Awesome. Well, appreciate it. No worries. Thank you so much. Thank you.