This is a written version of the LeaderSpeak podcast, summarized for quick reading. It has been republished in a Q&A transcript format.

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1. Vitrina: Can you tell us about your career journey, the path that led you to Zixi, and what excited you about the role?

Marc Aldrich: “I’ve been a business starter for a lot of my career… I was at Cisco for a large part of my career… We worked together to build the first standards-based cable modem termination system, CMTS, over DOCSIS… I took over the telco business, the media entertainment business, and I also took over global video for Cisco… I decided to leave Cisco and I got a call from AWS asking me to build their media and entertainment business… This is where I met Zixi because Zixi was an OEM partner of AWS’s through their elemental business… This opportunity with Zixi came along when Clearhaven purchased Zixi in June of last year… And I’m thrilled to be a part of the company because I think that certainly the experience I’ve had in the IP world, IP networking and cloud technology is directly applicable to Zixi’s tech and opportunity and future growth trajectory.”

“I’ve been a business starter for a lot of my career.”

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2. Vitrina: Can you provide an elevator pitch for Zixi and describe its role within the entertainment supply chain, including any recent innovations?

Marc Aldrich: “At a high level, 6E provides Emmy-winning software solutions for delivering broadcast quality video over any IP network with unmatched reliability and cost efficiency… We’ve been trusted by leading broadcasters and sports leagues for over 15 years… In summary, we deliver live broadcast quality video over any IP network, any cloud, any edge device using any protocol… I view us as kind of the lubrication in terms of how this all, how video flows in a very secure and high quality way.”

“There are feature enhancements that we’ve made available to customers. And the categories are ESNI, PoIS, and ESAM… ESNI is Event Scheduling and Notification Interface… It enables precise content switching based on schedule rules, which is critical for regional market-specific broadcast delivery like NFL football games or Premier League soccer… POIS, which is Placement Opportunity Information Service, acts as a decision engine to define ad content placement opportunities within the stream, personalization and monetization… ESAM is event signaling and management API… It’s the industry standard by which a stream switching takes place with POIs… So what ECM does, it provides the orchestration layer. It connects the Zixi broadcaster with decision servers, the POIs and ESNI servers to control switching.”

“There’s no question to whether the media and entertainment industry is moving to digital and IP. It’s happening. And we are an important, I think we’re an important catalyst and ingredient to enable this to happen in an elegant and an accelerated fashion as possible.”

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3. Vitrina: You mentioned that Zixi provides the technology that enables ad solutions and personalization. Is this area of the business undergoing rapid transformation, and what are the biggest industry trends you’re seeing?

Marc Aldrich: “Well, so from an industry perspective, I mean, there’s a lot happening from a transformation perspective. Certainly monetization space has been very hot… The biggest one I have to say is what’s happened recently in July 4th. So the US government passed the big, beautiful bill… to auction off 100 megahertz of the remaining C-band spectrum in the US by 2027… This to me is maybe the seismic shift in the industry that people anticipated potentially coming, but I don’t know that anybody thought it would happen this fast. But what I’ve talked about in the beginning is there’s not a question of whether the industry is going towards IP. It’s absolutely going to IP.”

“I just read this week that the streaming far surpassed broadcast viewership over the past few months. And so it’s no question that viewer habits have changed… Many of the streamers are still working towards getting that profitable distribution video, getting fresh content, newer content, doing that in efficient way, personalization, monetization… If you do targeted advertising, if you do it the right way, it actually is content because the receiver and the user wants to hear the information because it’s information that’s important to them… The move to IP and part of that’s because of the 5G repack that happened in 23… It creates issues when you move away from the C-Band spectrum, but also creates opportunity. And as the industry continues to move to IP, there is an opportunity to improve the quality, the agility, cost and a lot of benefits that go along with it.”

“This to me is maybe the seismic shift in the industry that people anticipated potentially coming, but I don’t know that anybody thought it would happen this fast.”

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4. Vitrina: Zixi has a very diverse customer base. Can you elaborate on the types of customers you’re onboarding and the interoperability challenges they face?

Marc Aldrich: “We have customers like TV station groups like Nextar and Sinclair, and we have Gray Media. We have Paramount Global. We have Fox as broadcasters. We have Fubo as a virtual MPVD, Prime as a virtual MPVD, YouTube TV as a virtual MPVD… We carry the of the range and gamut… All these individual entities are connected as well because content traverses through all of these different mediums at different times depending on what that supply chain looks like… We deliver 13 different protocols… whether it’s risk, RTP, it’s HLS, STP… or Zixi, we re-translate all those and we deliver those to the standards that our customers expect.”

“When you talk about the challenges of this massive transition, some of the things that the FCC has to consider… once satellite distribution is gone, physical redundancy deficit has happened. So many stations have only one terrestrial duct… If that gets cut, you have a total outage… Rural bandwidth constraints. So you have limited throughput and high costs in rural areas for HD and UHD delivery. So the infrastructure upgrades are very costly and also very slow. And then you have policy risks… The service degradation undermines the FCC goals of universal access, resilient infrastructure and competitive fairness.”

“We’re a conduit to enable that trust boundary across each of those entities… When the Zixi checks the quality of the video as it goes through each connecting point, we view that as our trust boundary.”

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5. Vitrina: Can you provide some specific use cases for Zixi from live events, FAST, and OTT, and share details about your partnership with Amagi?

Marc Aldrich: “Live event contribution, as I mentioned with Sky Sports Plus, we’re doing a lot of that where we’re enabling the signal to get into the network and out in a high quality manner. We do meet me rooms, club meet me rooms for both the NHL and Major League Baseball, where they take all of their games and make them available to all of their licensees and people that have rights to their content to distribute… We’re doing fiber replacement, global fiber replacement for a number of companies around the globe… The ability to leverage the internet at scale with observability using 6E technology is a really compelling business case use case for many companies that have fiber networks when they don’t have any visibility and they’re very expensive.”

“I think the emerging opportunity for Amagi and Zixi and what we’re talking about is the satellite augmentation space… We partnered very closely on Sinclair where they’re delivering all aspects of the Sinclair signal around connecting with AWS and the cloud… We help present the fast channels to Amagi and they distribute them in their play out system… I’m extremely excited about the relationship we have with Amagi… I’m very excited to work with Srini, Dan, Paul and the entire team over there because I think we have a tremendous amount of opportunity in front of us.”

“I’m extremely excited about the relationship we have with Amagi… I think we have a tremendous amount of opportunity in front of us.”

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6. Vitrina: As your first anniversary with Zixi approaches, what are you most excited about as a leader and what can you share with us regarding your future roadmap?

Marc Aldrich: “I made a lot of changes when I got here relative to two things. One, embrace the things that we do really well. Two, proliferate the things that we do really well that people don’t know about… I changed the commercial model so that we had a very flexible set of commercial offers that mapped to the customer business outcomes, whether it’s per channel pricing, per stream pricing, per event pricing, per hour pricing… The feedback that I’ve gotten thus far is that we, with this new pricing methodology, customers and partners are both very happy.”

“I will tell you what some of the future functionality that we’re announcing in IBC. So we previewed some of this stuff at NAB, but now it’s something that’s going to be ready when we get to IBC. So zero latency frame thinning… It enables smooth streaming over congested networks by intelligently removing frames from the stream without violating the transport stream standard… We have a new mobile application. So basically turning your phone into a Zixi enabled camera and encoder… So the ability with bonding capabilities and Zen Master integration… to use that phone as a kind of a camera and encoder that is Zixi-fied is pretty exciting.”

“Zixi works really well when other things don’t work really well. So our technology allows the content to be delivered in a really high quality fashion, even when the environment is not high quality.”