The Challenge Facing Modern Broadcasters
As virtualization transforms the media industry, video workflows are intersecting in new ways every day, allowing for agile, cost-effective business models and the ability for content owners to monetize content across more platforms. With vast amounts of data being transmitted across increasingly complex supply chains, broadcast workflows have become more difficult to manage, and problems are harder to diagnose. As media organizations connect more on-prem and cloud resources together—equipment from different vendors, sources from other business units and partner organizations—and distribute to new device types, there is an ever-expanding amount of log and telemetry data. Most of this data gets ignored. Why? Broadcast engineers have more information than they can effectively process, and they often silence alerts and alarms because they are just too frequent. It can be impossible to tell what is and isn’t important, and too often that leaves them in the dark, just hoping for the best.
Advanced analytics can help with these problems—making sense of the avalanche of data, helping human operators know where to focus, and revealing where issues are likely to occur before failures are noticed. Zixi helps media companies take advantage of the unprecedented opportunity to leverage these toolsets for sophisticated event correlation, data aggregation, deep learning, and virtually limitless applications to improve broadcast workflows.
See Problems Before They Happen with Zixi’s Intelligent Data Platform
The Zixi Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) delivers live broadcast-quality video at the lowest latency and the highest reliability over any IP network. With more than a decade of experience pioneering live video delivery using the Zixi protocol and the ZEN Master control plane, Zixi has unique insight into the dynamics of the network and how video data is transmitted.
The Zixi Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) is the culmination of years of investments in data architecture, advanced analytics, machine learning, AI, and event correlation work that enables users to oversee, manage, and deeply understand their inputs and outputs by providing ultimate visibility using learning algorithms to work with extremely large data sets and customize intelligence. While AI and ML are not novel concepts, they have been largely underutilized in the broadcast and media industries up to this point.
How Does the Intelligent Data Platform Work?
The IDP consists of a data bus that aggregates data from all Zixi endpoints, including encoders, cloud services, networks—any of the 250+ devices and systems with Zixi built in. This telemetry data is sent to Zixi’s cloud machine learning platform and fed into continuously updated models where events are correlated, and patterns discovered. The system uses historical data to form a model of normal behavior and generates an anomaly score. The IDP also uses a predictive model to determine the likelihood of unrecoverable dropped packets or stream failure within the next 2 hours—the Zixi Health Score. Both the Anomaly and the Health Scores are communicated to ZEN Master where they are shown as indicators and graphs over time.
By utilizing more than 3 billion data samples per day, Zixi’s machine learning models are constantly being trained for accuracy and consistency, continuing to improve over time as more data is aggregated across the platform. With the SDVP powering the highest value live streams in the world, the IDP has unique access to network and video quality telemetry and can leverage these and additional strengths to produce proactive data insights in a variety of ways.
Zixi Intelligent Data Platform Core Features
Zixi Health Score
- Prediction of degraded video and lost packets during a 2-hour window
- Prediction of offline state
- Utilizes event correlation and a variety of data inputs to produce a tangible, numerical value
- Continuously improving ML, based on 100 correlated measurements per source, in real-time
- Root-Case Analysis indicators for rapid issue solution
Anomaly Detection
- Continuous graphs of detected anomalies per source over time
- ML-based model learns normal behavior to identify deviations (Predictive Analytics)
- Allows engineers to pinpoint errors faster using historical and real-time data
Historical Graphs
- View health score, anomalies, statistics and more over time
to identify trends
Video Content Quality
- Silence detection
- Clipped audio
- Blank image
- Still image
- Encoding quality
- Audio levels
Perceptual Video Quality:
Smart Alerts
- Real-time error detection and notification
- Customizable alert thresholds based on your use case
- ML-based Health score alerting
Intelligent AI-Based Protocol
- Zixi.AI Protocol provides real time dynamic ML rate control
What Benefits Will the IDP Bring?
The IDP provides an immediate and lasting boost to visibility, productivity, will reduce operational cost and save time – while ultimately improving the quality of service delivered to consumers. With the IDP, broadcast engineers and media organizations can:
- Eliminate Data Overload and focus on what is important: The IDP’s intelligent alerts and health scores help sift through and aggregate data trends so that teams can focus where they need to without the distraction of false alarms.
- Be Predictive and Proactive: Fixing problems after system errors is costly and stressful. Predictive and proactive maintenance is conversely orders of magnitude less expensive and simple.
- Reduce costs and improve RCA: Engineers and broadcasters need to be able to identify the root causes of instability and failure faster and more easily.
- Increase Productivity: Instead of spending time and money sifting through mountains of data, the IDP efficiently identifies problems.
- Achieve Greater Insight and Visibility: A reactive or break-fix approach suffers from lack of oversight and is subject to mass variability and volatility. The IDP keeps ahead of errors and issues before they become problems with continuous visibility.
With the power of advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, the Intelligent Data Platform provides the transparency and control needed to guarantee reliable broadcast operation. To learn more about how the IDP can help perfect live video delivery over any IP network, please visit our website: Zixi - Intelligent Data Platform.
Zixi provides a cloud based and on-premises Software-Defined Video Platform 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. The SDVP makes it easy and economical for media companies to source, manage, localize, and distribute live events and 24/7 live linear channels in broadcast QoS, securely and at scale, using any form of IP network or Hybrid IP environments. Over 10+ years, the Zixi Enabled Network (ZEN) has grown to over 250 OEM and service providers and serves well over 700 customers representing most of the top media brands around the world with 20,000+ channels delivered daily. www.zixi.com