WALTHAM, Mass.— Zixi has announced an integration of Zixi-as-a-Service (ZaaS) with Cinedigm’s Matchpoint Platform Suite.
The move will help Cinedigm expand its free-ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel business.
"Zixi delivers actionable insights on the health and performance of fast channels, enabling the operational agility we need to rapidly scale,” said Tony Huidor, chief technology & product officer at Cinedigm. “Cinedigm has scaled to the point where we need to more directly manage distribution of our FAST channel portfolio, this partnership with Zixi makes that operationally possible and economically feasible.”
“Cinedigm needed a way to operationally manage the end-user experience,” said Peter Dawidzik, Director of Sales, Zixi. “Integrating the full suite of Zixi capabilities with video-optimized cloud infrastructure, ZaaS delivers economic, performance and operational efficiencies that are supporting the rapidly scaling FAST channel delivery services Cinedigm offers.”
Through a diverse mix of premium SVOD services and dedicated AVOD and FAST channels, the Cinedigm has a portfolio of 30 streaming channels offering premium content in a variety of popular genres to 90 million consumers worldwide on more than a billion devices.
Cinedigm developed its own proprietary solution, Matchpoint Dispatch, for managing their massive library of film and television content and enriching content metadata, enforcing territorial along with platform rights and distributing scheduling metadata associated with the content library.
Through a direct integration with ZaaS, Matchpoint utilizes Gracenote’s programming metadata and proprietary IDs to help organize assets, aid in audience discovery and support content scheduling across major FAST channel platforms, the companies said.
Cinedigm’s Linear Playout partner originates a mezzanine Zixi-enabled master transport stream for each of Cinedigm’s channels, pushing these across geographically diverse signal paths to ZaaS.
ZaaS provides Cinedigm real-time telemetry data, advanced network congestion and error-correction management and significant bandwidth efficiency improvements over deployed legacy systems. With well-structured hierarchical entertainment feed data, Cinedigm builds programmatic playout schedules. An electronic program guide is generated for each of over 20 channels, including defining ad avails within the program schedule. ZaaS transcode engines create a quality optimized ABR streaming ladder packaged for distribution to the content origin servers and validates stream health and compliance with each partner’s delivery specifications. ZaaS provides broadcast infrastructure as a service, enabling media companies and service providers to quickly leverage IP to ingest and distribute live video with ultra-low latency, allowing the push or pull of live and live linear video into or out of the cloud, Zixi said.
With this service broadcasters can easily scale to add new partners, leveraging ZaaS for video processing as well as the additional data, analytics, security and Quality of Service that professional broadcast requires. ZaaS allows media and entertainment companies to extend existing on-premises infrastructures and capabilities to the cloud, and with ZEN Master, the industry's leading virtual control plane, users can orchestrate, manage and monitor broadcast quality, low latency live video workflows from anywhere in the world. Delivering the Zixi protocol, the most robust and mature live video protocol in the industry, ZaaS also supports RIST, RTP+FEC, HLS, CMAF HLS, DASH and RTMP to provide the industry’s most universal solution for ingest and delivery across any IP network and edge device including over 400 integrated partners. The SDVP also includes transcoding, packaging, and CDN origin for OTT workflows, as well as Packet Identifier (PID) mapping allowing content to be normalized to certain encoding parameters with PIDs aligned to downstream workflows, Zixi reported.
