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
info@zixi.com
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
info@zixi.com
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
info@zixi.com
www.zixi.com