Dumb question, right? Of course you — and increasingly the rest of the world — watch all kinds of video on the Internet. And we all know it’s occasionally a frustrating experience. Images break-up, pixelate, stop or — my favorite — go audio only.
Still, despite the low quality experience we are often stuck with, every estimate of Internet traffic discovers that video is the #1 driver of traffic. There is a titanic battle going on between the FCC and ISPs over who has to carry what at what kind of pricing. Business models are being destroyed and rebuilt. It’s a sea-change in the enormous broadcast and media industry. If you are a broadcaster, content producer or even a company whose employee meetings are broadcast worldwide, you have to be thinking about how you can use the unmanaged Internet to distribute your content. The appeal (cost, availability, new applications) is just so strong that the migration to the Internet for all aspects of video production is inevitable.
You know all this already, of course. But what you may not know is that while the move to a pure-Internet distribution infrastructure for video is well under way, the Internet and video are oil and water. They are dark and light. Yin and yang. Despair and hope. Love and hate. The Internet — fundamentally designed as a non-guaranteed packet-based network — and video — reliant on low latency and predictable arrival — just didn’t mix well. That’s why sometimes you want to throw the tablet across the room or an independent news organization cannot afford a remote feed or that online training class you attended delivered such a poor experience.
The bad marriage of the Internet and video was destined to get worse until ZiXi. ZiXi is a new protocol and software system that marries the Internet and video. ZiXi is going to revolutionize the way HD video is delivered on the Internet. ZiXi makes it possible for content producers to forget that the Internet wasn’t designed for video. It makes it easy for people to do what they want to do: deliver more video in HD quality using the Internet.
Why am I going on about video and the Internet and a specific product? It’s because I have joined ZiXi as its new vp of marketing. This marks a turn from what I’ve been doing for the last four years (process and collaboration) to something I’ve always wanted to do: deep networking with a focus on the media and entertainment industry. Zixi is exciting is so many ways. First, I can explain it to people pretty easily. (Business process automation is, ahem, a little abstract.) Second, behind the easy explanation is some deep geek stuff…the kind of technology that I love to learn and explain as a marketer.
So stay tuned to us. You’ll know it’s ZiXi behind the experience when you watch a video on your Internet-connected device that starts instantly, is in crystal-clear HD and never hiccups.
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