ZiXi announced that the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s (UMass) athletic department has selected ZiXi’s cloud-based Video Transport Platform to televise its sporting events for the 2011-2012 season. UMass is scheduled to produce and air more than 50 Division 1 games on two New England stations, WBIN-TV and WSHM-TV.
UMass-Amherst has a renowned Division I athletics program, which includes basketball, football, hockey, lacrosse, softball, swimming, tennis, and track and field. In order to better serve its thousands of fans across New England, the athletic department wanted to both improve the image quality of its broadcasts and broaden its athletic team coverage. UMass had begun airing games on television using a homegrown solution during the 2010-11 season. Wanting to upgrade the on-air quality of these broadcasts, UMass originally considered buying satellite time or using fiber transmission, but those options proved to be far too expensive for a University budget. When UMass learned of ZiXi’s groundbreaking video transmission solution that uses the Internet instead of satellite or fiber, they were intrigued.
“As a Division I athletic department, UMass wants its fans to be able to follow their favorite teams even if they can’t make all of the games. So, what they see on TV has to be high quality,” said Josh Maurer, assistant athletic director for Broadcasting at UMass. “ZiXi enabled us to give our fans exactly what they want, more real-time, broadcast-quality programming, all within a University budget.”
“New Englanders are huge sports fans, so we are thrilled to help UMass broaden its televised coverage and improve the image quality of its Division 1 games,” said Israel Drori, ZiXi’s CEO and founder. “ZiXi turns the Internet into a better, smarter more affordable way to transport video while maintaining the highest video quality. So, even when televising athletic events, which presents unique challenges due to the amount of movement involved, ZiXi delivers the game in real-time. And, UMass can use ZiXi to extend its viewership to mobile devices and tablets, allowing fans the freedom to watch games anywhere, anytime, and on any device.”
ZiXi’s Video Transport solutions deliver live and video on demand distribution from the field over the Internet at a fraction of the cost of expensive fiber and satellite video distribution solutions. The patented ZiXi Video Transport Platform eliminates the common problems associated with video distribution, including packet loss, jitter and latency. For mobile and Over-the-top providers, ZiXi ensures optimum video quality and scalability for a wide range of devices and screen sizes.
