Ultimate Fighting Championship - UFC
Transcription
Ultimate Fighting Championship - UFC
CASE STUDY Location Global The Situation To find a way to distribute live HD video from venues located around the world delivered to multiple partners in different formats. The Challenge UFC needed a way to easily spin up live feeds and send UFC fight content in various bit rates and protocols to a variety of partners. Remote Live Production over IP End to end cloud video delivery OTT digital delivery to Bars, restaurants, and Gyms Zixi, LLC +1 877 494 9426 +1 781 890 9690 [email protected] www.zixi.com Ultimate Fighting Championship - UFC The Challenge The UFC needed to find a way to distribute live HD video from venues located around the world delivered to multiple partners in different formats. The UFC looked to technology partners Zixi to come up with smart ways to use Internet connectivity for end to end delivery of live UFC press conferences, weigh-ins, and the fights reliably and economically. The UFC will produce approximately 60 six-hour live fight events happening around the world with Live Weigh Ins and Live Press Conferences pre and post-fight. The challenge for the UFC was delivering all this live content to its partners and customers, from venues located all over the world including Macau, Mexico, South America, Canada, the US, and more. The UFC needed a way to easily spin up live feeds and send UFC fight content in various bit rates and protocols to a variety of partners. The UFC also wanted to include fight metadata while also including closed captioning and slates. The system had to be reliable, stable, proven and redundant. Last but not least the UFC wanted to plug this into an existing live event workflow seamlessly while delivering the live feeds into its MAM system. The UFC turned to Zixi for a solution. Using Zixi enabled partner encoders, an internet switch, and Zixi appliance HW, Zixi designed portable racks that once initially configured, are plug-n-play. The Solution Zixi worked with the UFC to understand its workflow needs and designed an end to end digital delivery pipeline of their content live to all of its partners meeting their metadata, reliability, security, and CC/slate requirements built on the Zixi platform. Using Zixi enabled partner encoders, an internet switch, and Zixi appliance HW, Zixi designed portable racks that once initially configured, are plug-n-play. There are 6 Zixi travel units that the UFC sends around the world to wherever a fight is taking place which is almost every weekend of the calendar year. Once on site, these racks are powered up, plugged into the internet, and given a live feed from the truck, and the system is live. Zixi Cloud Broadcaster: Manage, Process, Distribute: Once the stream is encapsulated by the Zixi Feeder Unit, the live UFC fight, typically a 1080i HD 5- to 10-Mbps MPEG Transport Stream (TS) from a given venue, is securely delivered using Zixi over the public Internet and sent to Zixi Broadcaster in the cloud. Zixi’s network aware protocol uses adaptive bit rate technology and advanced error correction techniques to maintain an HD-quality signal and can sustain packet loss of even 30% while delivering over any distance using a standard internet connection at the venue. • Design of end to end workflow for live delivery of UFC HD content with closed captioning and slates inserted • End to end delivery platform for every pre-fight weigh-in, press conference, and the fights • Zixi Managed service for delivery to over 200 partners • Zixi sends stream to AMV (All Mobile Video) to add closed captioning and slates to the live stream • Zixi delivers live UFC fights over the top to Zixi enabled set top boxes in bars, hotels, and restaurants • Zixi OTT database manages conditional access of PPV content delivery to those boxes • Zixi delivers live feed to Levels Beyond MAM system for live highlight creation based on metadata tagged by Fight Metric delivered to social media Cloud Recording, Tagging, and highlights: As the fight is happening, The UFC is recording the live Zixi stream to an AWS S3 cloud storage instance. Loggers at Fight Metric are tagging the fight live as it happens with metadata tied to the timecode in the feed that is then used to create highlights that partners can access. This is all stored long term in a Levels Beyond MAM system (reach engine). This enables the UFC to push fight and press conference highlights to partners and social media as soon as an event happens. “ “ The Result The Zixi Feeder delivers the protected stream to a Zixi cloud Broadcaster that is located on an EC2 set of servers in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for management, processing, and distribution. The configuration of the UFC Zixi environment is designed by Zixi solutions architects to be scalable with redundant servers for end to end failover capability. To handle the UFC requirements of delivering to partners in various bit rates and protocols, Zixi simultaneously transcodes the primary MPEG TS stream to RTMP and HLS at appropriate bitrates for delivery to distribution partners Akamai, Mirror Image, YouTube, Sony, Level 3 and other platforms. We needed a secure, scalable, reliable, redundant end to end managed service to deliver UFC live content to all our digital partners from fights happening at venues located anywhere in the world every weekend. Zixi provides this for us today. Christy King Vice President UFC Operations, Digital Media Technology The Configuration UFC end to end Cloud Production and Digital Delivery Pipeline over IP with Zixi Zixi, LLC +1 877 494 9426 +1 781 890 9690 [email protected] www.zixi.com Live Pay Per View delivered Over the Top with Zixi UFC PPV (Pay Per View) events are delivered live over the top to bars, hotels, and gyms using Zixi. Zixi enabled set top boxes are deployed in bars, gyms, and hotels and are receiving the PPV events. Zixi created a back end database to manage conditional access knowing if a bar has paid for the fight. Users call Joe Hand, a UFC partner, and can order the fight. Once the fight is ordered the box is given access to paid content in the Zixi OTT database. If a STB is not given access because the bar has not purchased the fight, the box will pay all the free content (weigh-in, press conference, and undercard) and then will play a promotional reel for the fight that is happening while throwing up a 1-800 number. PPV fights can be turned on in minutes using the Zixi OTT solution and DB. How the UFC uses Zixi: 1. Design of end to end workflow for live delivery of UFC HD content with closed captioning and slates inserted 2. End to end delivery platform for every pre-fight weigh-in, press conference, and the fights 3. Zixi Managed service for delivery to over 200 partners 4. Zixi sends stream to AMV (All Mobile Video) to add closed captioning and slates to the live stream Zixi partner All Mobile Video adds Closed Captioning and inserts slates into the live Zixi stream during delivery 5. Zixi delivers live UFC fights over the top to Zixi enabled set top boxes in bars, hotels, and restaurants 6. Zixi OTT database manages conditional access of PPV content delivery to those boxes 7. Zixi delivers live feed to Levels Beyond MAM system for live highlight creation based on metadata tagged by Fight Metric delivered to social media Major Zixi Protocol Feature Benefits: • Automated QoS - perfect quality even in network connections with high jitter and over 40% packet loss • Codec agnostic - future-proofed for H265, other • Flexibility - works with any encoder, decoder/IRD and STB • Fixed latency delivery - can be sub-second globally • Low/no overhead required • SSH secure remote management • SNMP remote monitoring • Hot standby redundancy from source to Broadcaster servers to destinations • Scalability - the only limit is server processor power and bandwidth for more information go to www.zixi.com Zixi, LLC 950 Winter St. Suite 3102 Waltham, MA 02451 USA +1 877 494 9426 +1 781 890 9690 [email protected] www.zixi.com
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