HaiVision and Zixi Team for Internet Broadcast
HaiVision Systems, a vendor of high-performance H.264 HD and SD video codecs, and Zixi, a supplier of HD Instant Video Delivery Network products, teamed for their first successful broadcast of live HD video over the public Internet.
HaiVision Systems, a vendor of high-performance H.264 HD and SD video codecs, and Zixi, a supplier of HD Instant Video Delivery Network (IVDN) products, teamed for their first successful broadcast of live HD video over the public Internet.
According to the companies, the broadcasts were transmitted from the Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) in New York City to remote studio facilities in the United States and simultaneously to several other sites worldwide, where viewers accessed video using either a Web browser or Internet-enabled (IP) set-top box. The real-time HD broadcasts were transmitted over the Internet using Zixi’s IVDN platform to recover and reorder lost packets in real time.
The 1080i feeds were transmitted between the CUMC and convention centers using HaiVision’s ultra-low latency MAKO-HD H.264 HD codecs. At other locations worldwide, audiences simultaneously viewed the transmission using software decoders on standard PCs. The Internet services at both ends were standard general-purpose ISP connections, with the stream serviced by the Zixi IVDN platform.
“Through the combination of Zixi’s IVDN and our MAKO-HD codec, the transport of HD video over the Internet requires only adequate first- and last-mile bandwidth,” said Peter Maag, HaiVision vice president, in a statement.
The broadcast used Zixi’s IVDN platform at the source and receiving ends to refine the data traffic, recover lost packets, and reduce jitter. The latency from source to destination–including the MAKO-HD’s 70 ms of encode and decode–was under 500 milliseconds, the companies said. The Zixi IVDN and HaiVision MAKO-HD continuously streamed video despite as much as 25 percent packet loss on the connection.
