Zixi – Beyond Free Protocols: How Resiliency and Orchestration Reduce Real-World IP Video Costs
Andrew Reich, VP of Business Development, Zixi
The Limits of Free Protocols
As the media and entertainment industry accelerates its shift toward IP-based delivery, many organizations turn to ‘free’ open-source transport protocols as a starting point. But the initial appeal often fades quickly, as teams encounter hidden costs tied to reliability, scalability, and operational complexity.
Live video demands smooth, uninterrupted delivery, with little room for error. Any disruption impacts quality, jeopardizes revenue, and erodes audience engagement. As broadcasters reassess their workflows, the economics of IP transport now hinge on predictability, visibility, and the ability to quickly support new opportunities without friction. Cutting costs still matters, but ensuring reliability and agility is just as critical, if not more, to protecting revenue and enabling growth.
Organizations like the National Hot Rod Association, Nine Radio, and Octal show that investing in resilience and orchestration delivers measurable gains in performance, scalability, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Efficiency as a Cost Multiplier
Open-source protocols may appear cost-effective at first, but when networks and live broadcasts experience congestion or packet loss, retransmission traffic can grow exponentially which drives up compute and cloud egress costs. That retransmission growth and cost often compound with degradation in video quality and increased latency. What seems “free” at the protocol level can often result in unpredictable downstream expenses.
Zixi takes a fundamentally different approach. The Zixi Platform uses adaptive congestion recovery, null-packet compression, and other intelligent bandwidth-optimization technologies to cut egress and compute costs by up to 50%, all while maintaining 99.999% reliability. ZEN Master, Zixi’s cloud-based control plane for orchestration, monitoring, and management, provides centralized visibility and automation that simplify even the most complex live video workflows.
Beyond efficiency, Zixi brings predictability. The platform orchestrates live video across protocols, networks, and cloud environments within a single unified system, giving organizations tighter cost control and the confidence to scale revenue-generating services.
Case Study: Nine Radio Unlocks Speed and Simplicity
For Nine Radio, this delivered both simplicity and speed.
“Before I even spoke to [Zixi], I’d already had a working system set up…the docs and installation guides were so intuitive.” said William Todd, Head of Technology at Nine Radio.
This seamless deployment accelerated time-to-value, reinforcing how true cost efficiency stems from faster delivery and fewer operational dependencies.
Nine Radio embraced a hybrid cloud strategy through AWS Marketplace, combining on-prem and EC2 deployments for operational diversity and cost alignment. “We have a contract through the AWS Marketplace… some on-prem and some in EC2… without actually physically going and buying hardware.”
Case Study: NHRA Builds Reliability in Challenging Environments
A core challenge for the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) is that many of its tracks sit in rural locations with unreliable connectivity. Yet with full days of racing and a passionate subscriber base, delivering a consistent, high-quality stream is non-negotiable.
“It’s a long day of racing and to make sure that we’re able to provide a good experience for all of those viewers, we have to have [redundancy],” said Rob Hedrick, Sr. Director of Production for the NHRA.
To overcome those bandwidth constraints, Hedrick designed a Zixi-based workflow that layers in redundancy and enables rapid, seamless switching across video sources.
“Zixi products really bring a lot to the table – not only the redundancy failover, but it also allows for a lot of monitoring options that you wouldn’t have over normal contribution streams. ZEN Master gives you the tools to dive deep on any kind of loss issues,” Hedrick added.
Despite inconsistent bandwidth at the various event sites, NHRA relies on the Zixi Platform to deliver a stable, high-quality viewing experience for fans and subscribers.
The shift from satellite and fiber to IP is about more than modernizing transport. It’s about gaining real-time visibility and control across the entire workflow. ZEN Master’s unified interface and telemetry tools make that possible.
“With Zixi, the ability to have the feedback…I can see which decoders are online…which channels they’re taking, the statistics. That has been a huge help for us,” said Todd.
This level of telemetry enables proactive support, faster troubleshooting, and tighter accountability across affiliates and distribution partners. These are capabilities that open-source tools rarely provide.
Case Study: Octal Proves Agility Wins in High-Mobility Live Events
For Octal’s live coverage of Dior’s Paris Fashion Week, the Zixi Platform proved essential. Streaming over public 5G and Starlink connections from moving vehicles, Octal needed consistent performance in conditions where free protocols would struggle. Zixi’s efficiency, bonding, and congestion-aware recovery enabled stable 20 Mbps per feed transmission, even as network quality varied throughout the city.
“Without Zixi, it would be impossible” said Xavier Deschuyteneer, owner of Octal.
As production expanded from two to eight feeds in AWS, Octal quickly realized the operational advantage of Zixi’s elastic pricing model.
“I can scale easily and the price is really nice because you just pay for what you use,” Deschuyteneer noted.
This flexibility underscores a key trend in Media Tech economics: moving from fixed, overbuilt infrastructure toward usage-based architectures that align cost directly with production demand. When teams can scale up for high-intensity events and scale down immediately after, they gain agility without waste — an advantage that becomes even more critical as live event portfolios grow
Conclusion: The Real Value of Resiliency
In a market increasingly focused on cost control, the real economic advantage isn’t what’s “free” — it’s what’s predictable. Free or open-source protocols may eliminate licensing fees, but their gaps in visibility, orchestration, resiliency, and reliability often introduce higher long-term operational costs.
The experiences of Nine Radio, the NHRA, and Octal illustrate that true democratization of IP video delivery comes from intelligent, efficient platforms that ensure reliability at scale and make economics transparent. With enterprise-grade resiliency and flexible OpEx models, today’s modern IP workflows give broadcasters the confidence, agility, and cost efficiency required to grow without compromise.
