ONN News Station Replaces Satellite Feed for Cost-Saving IP-Based Solution with ZiXi

WBNS ONN is Central Ohio’s news leader, providing the Columbus area with breaking news, weather, traffic, and sports coverage. The station’s Ohio News Network Division, ONN, contributes content to 16 cable head ends in Ohio and the surrounding areas. Until recently, ONN was sending their new content to these 15 head end cable stations via satellite feed for the last fifteen years. This was a reliable, but very expensive solution. ONN was looking to reduce their operational costs of contributing content to these head ends in a seamless way where their employees, partners, and customers would not have to change the way they work, day-to-day, and the video quality would not be compromised. ONN decided to go IP.

Today, the Cincinnati news station is using the ZiXi Broadcaster with a separate encoder, for a cost-effective video contribution model. ZiXi’s platform has allowed ONN to shift from costly satellite contribution to high-speed IP video delivery over the public Internet ― without otherwise altering its working environment or processes.

ZiXi’s platform turns high-speed Internet and Intranet connections into Instant Video Delivery Networks (IVDNs), making any Web site or corporate network a broadcasting hub with SD to HD capabilities. For a fraction of the cost of traditional long-haul video delivery methods such as CDN, satellite, or dedicated or leased lines, ZiXi delivers SD and full HD quality video in real time to anywhere in the world on any device using existing network infrastructure. The ZiXi platform uses end-to-end, real-time clock synchronization that enables timely delivery and recovery of lost packets, ensuring low or zero latency delivery of HD video over standard IP connections without quality of service guarantees and without any tradeoffs among resolution, pauses for re-buffering, and startup delay, making the system ideal for ONN.

“We relied on satellite delivery at 9 Mbps for nearly 15 years, but now with ZiXi’s content broadcast and media management hub, we can deliver the same quality signal over a standard IP connection using a third of the bandwidth. Without changing any part of our production workflow, we’ve been able to realize reliable, real-time point-to-multipoint delivery at a fraction of the cost of our earlier long-haul video delivery model.”
– Pat Ingram, Director of Engineering

ZiXi’s advanced video delivery technology provides ONN with a cost-effective and easily scalable solution for video contribution. Video from the ONN studio is encoded, then sent to the ZiXi Feeder and Broadcaster which send the signal over the public Internet to ZiXi Receiver units installed at each of the fifteen head end locations. There, the stream is processed by a decoder, which provides SD-SDI video for cable broadcast. This solution boasts no packet loss and low jitter and provides 24/7 always-on performance, which ONN engineers can manage and monitor through the platform’s intuitive interface.

The installation at ONN demonstrates how simply broadcasters can employ advanced encoding and delivery solutions to realize significant cost savings with virtually no impact on operations or video quality.