Streaming video in the enterprise has gone mainstream. Now a key element in any enterprise communications strategy, streaming video has taken its place alongside telephony, email, and video conferencing as an essential tool for business communications. Today’s businesses use video in a wide variety of applications, including executive presentations, corporate training, employee communications, compliance videos, webinars, new product rollouts and TV distribution. By engaging more of our senses, video improves communications by offering participants a vivid and compelling viewing experience.

Despite recent technical improvements in streaming video picture quality, compression, and distribution, the end-user viewing experience often falls short of expectations. Overtaxed network backbones, network latency, and low throughput wireless connections make video streaming problematic. Clients also regularly complain of reliability issues such as poor branch office connections, dropped sessions, frozen video players, and stream startup issues. IT departments are also tasked to manage the rapid growth of corporate video efficiently. User and stream access should be secure and corporate networks must avoid downtime due to bottlenecks and excessive bandwidth usage. IT complexity is further compounded by distributed enterprise topologies, diverse video management tools, and bandwidth provisioning and monitoring challenges.

What is the reason behind most streaming video problems? Dated legacy transport protocols that were never designed to handle the challenging network conditions encountered by streaming video. Furthermore, enterprise video distribution solutions that work well on the Internet, like edgecaching, buffering, reflectors, CDNs, and websharing applications, are cost prohibitive on private IP networks. Mobile clients present numerous challenges, including new protocols, widely distributed user populations, and the use of the public Internet to reach sales, support, and field personnel. The mobile applications that have emerged over the past several months address only part of the real challenge; a true end-to-end solution is needed in the enterprise.

Enterprise Video

Enter ZiXi. Taking a fresh look at the issue of video quality and reliability, our team of mathematicians and engineers has developed a patented new end-to-end video transport solution that eliminates these problems at their source, the network transport layer.

ZiXi gives enterprises the ability to deliver video efficiently, manage video distribution, and prevent video from impacting mission critical applications on the corporate network. The ZiXi Enterprise Video solution provides flexible controlled access of one-way live or recorded video communication from senior executives, trainers, or marketers to a locally or geographically dispersed enterprise. At the video source, encoded streams are fed into the ZiXi Video Management System™ for distribution. Multiple options are available at the receiving end, including ZiXi Client™ software (running on a PC, tablet, or smartphone), a set-top box for connection to a display, or a ZiXi Receiver™ and hardware decoder for connection to legacy and 3rd party video distribution systems. ZiXi’s solution works with both live and on-demand video and streams to end-user mobile devices and PCs running industry standard applications from Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and others.

Benefits Include:

• True HD video quality (up to 1080p/60fps)
• Multi-screen support: Stream video to desktops, laptops, displays, tablets, and smartphones
• Live event support
• Improved viewing experience for remote offices or mobile devices
• More efficient bandwidth utilization for improved video quality
• Operates over the Internet and private IP wired or wireless networks
• Enterprise grade scalability and redundancy
• Secure video distribution to remote sites over the public Internet
• Reliable 24x7 streaming
• Multi-bitrate support
• Reduced costs in comparison with remote video caching systems, network upgrades, web sharing applications or CDNs
• Integrates easily without changing existing workflows
• Video viewing access controls (Microsoft AD) to prevent network congestion and enhance security
• Set of certified complimentary components: encoders, decoders, cameras, set-top boxes, and more
• Convenient, easy-touse monitoring and management tools

Technical Innovation

Designed from inception with video in mind, ZiXi’s innovative transport protocol eliminates common network impairments like packet loss, jitter, and out-of-sequence packets. The result: pristine HD video quality, low latency, and no break-up or interruptions. Without resorting to additional buffering and long startup delays, the ZiXi protocol uses a variety of techniques to accomplish this, including real-time rate adaption, end-to-end time synchronization, and low latency error correction.

Our unique approach avoids the shortcomings in latency, reach, and manageability encountered with other video distribution solutions. Like TCP and HTTP, ZiXi’s transport protocol offers assured packet delivery, but only adds a fraction of the overhead of those two protocols, thereby increasing effective video bandwidth by as much as 50 percent.

Conclusion

Among enterprise customers, the need for high quality, reliable, and cost-effective streaming video has never been greater. Despite widespread user acceptance and industry support, the full potential of video has not been realized, leaving many end-users and applications underserved. ZiXi’s advanced video distribution solution helps solve today’s video problems and lays the foundation for further service expansion and growth. Whether you have 100 employees or 100,000, ZiXi can help your enterprise improve communications while reducing costs, extending HD video out to every desktop or mobile device, regardless of location.

Representative Enterprise Customers

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