ZEN Master adds workflow flexibility, stream health visibility and stream analysis across networks, now extended with AWS Cloud Digital Interface transport and Elemental Link encoder.

Zixi source thumbnails

Zixi is continuing to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by integrating AWS Cloud Digital Interface (CDI) transport flows and the AWS Elemental Link encoder. These two capabilities have been added to the ZEN (Zixi Enabled Network) Master video management software, a live video orchestration and telemetry control plane used to manage large-scale configuration and monitoring of over 300 ZEN devices and appliances.

Using ZEN Master’s automatic configuration details for network resources and distribution targets, users can create new live channels and launch the required streams on the fly. Users can organise broadcast streams across industry protocols, whether the signal paths are point-to-point, one-to-many, multi-cloud or multi-CDN.

The software is designed with user configurable grids for monitoring systems and stream components at scale, with which multi-partner supply chains can be set up with graphical and email alerts and centralised access to local, remote and cloud-based devices from a single screen.

Less Complexity, More Visibility

“ZEN Master reduces the complexity of live-stream workflows with a set of virtual tools for configuring, orchestrating and monitoring delivery of live video at the individual channel and device level, or across an entire video content creation and distribution Enterprise,” said Greg Truax, head of Live Video Services at AWS Elemental. “The ZEN Master software-as-a-service runs on AWS services, and we have now extended our collaboration with Zixi.”

Zixi system health

ZEN Master system health

“Zixi’s work with AWS started with an API integration with AWS Elemental Live many years ago, and continued with the work for AWS Elemental MediaConnect,” said John Wastcoat, SVP Alliances and Marketing, Zixi.

With a tight API integration, ZEN Master adds workflow flexibility, layered stream health visibility and stream analysis across audio-video network parameters. It makes reporting and automation routines available that enhance the stability of the AWS Elemental MediaConnect transport service for live video, and the use of Amazon CloudWatch data to monitor AWS infrastructure.

Telemetry automatically measures and transmits data from remote sources to receivers for recording and analysis. Media companies and service providers use ZEN Master for visibility into multiple layers of telemetry, and gain the architectural flexibility to orchestrate and interoperate with other systems and infrastructures at regional and global scale.

Real-time Transfer

AWS Elemental Link devices are available as a source for AWS Elemental MediaLive, which encodes and compresses video streams for delivery to broadcast televisions and internet-connected devices. Elemental Link devices are shipped fully configured for AWS accounts, while ZEN Master configures MediaLive to send streams to MediaConnect.

Zixi live event target

Live event targets

AWS users can manage high quality, uncompressed live video using the AWS Cloud Digital Interface flows, transferred in real-time between software applications running on Amazon Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The EFA helps run applications that need high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. It has an interface that improves inter-instance communications, which is important when scaling the applications.

Available directly from Zixi, as well as public and private sales through the AWS Marketplace, these incremental flows from ZEN Master in, out and around new cloud environments, increase the interoperability of both software and hardware vendors in their production environment, at high bandwidth with low end-to-end latency.    www.zixi.com