NABBING THE SPOTLIGHT Zixi’s presentation at NAB Show Broadcasting reduces the cost of this essential functionality SWITCH IT I f you’re in Philadelphia, you’ll turn on the TV and tune into a Phillies As broadcasters increasingly adopt over-IP distribution, market switching via the cloud has become an obvious – yet potentially expensive – choice. Zixi gives a rundown of its implementation of the ESNI industry standard, which or Flyers game – or whatever sport is being broadcast to the City of Brotherly Love and its surrounding locales. The same
goes for Dodgers fans in SoCal, Knicks fans in New York City and Cubs fans in Chicago, and it’s all thanks to a process called market switching. Primarily used to distribute live sports, market switching is “the ability to change feeds to particular regions at a particular time,” defines Alan Young, vice president of product strategy at Zixi. “Sports games tend to be localised,” he adds, suggesting that “a game between the Yankees and Red Sox is likely to be shown in the New York and Boston areas, but people in California might not be interested.” Besides catering to regional consumer preferences and physically defined fanbases, market switching also ensures broadcasters follow local rights agreements.
NOW AND THEN To illustrate how market switching works, Young provides the following example: “A broadcaster might have 19 regional sports networks. Each one of those networks goes to a different region of the US and has teams associated with it.” Young continues: “They also broadcast 24 additional feeds called alternate feeds, and every single one of those 43 feeds go to every receiving site in the US.”
Traditionally, networks would use satellites to send and receive video signals, with an Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) performing switches from one feed to the next. “It’s done that way,” begins Young, “because the
LOCAL FEEDS Market switching is the best way to satisfy all regional viewers
feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook