ONN News Station Replaces Satellite Feed

for Cost-Saving IP-Based Solution from Haivision and Zixi

WBNS ONN is Central Ohio’s news leader, providing Columbus area

breaking news, weather, traffic, and sports coverage. The station’s
Ohio News Network Division, ONN, contributes content to 16 cable
head ends in Ohio and the surrounding areas. Until recently, ONN
was sending their new content to these 15 head end cable stations via
satellite feed for the last fifteen years. This was a reliable, but very
expensive solution. ONN was looking to reduce their operational costs
of contributing content to these head ends in a seamless way where
their employees, partners, and customers would not have to change the way they work, day-to-day,
and the video quality would not be compromised. ONN decided to go IP.

Today, the Cincinnati news station is using the Haivision Barracuda™ H.264 encoder with the Zixi
Media Broadcaster for a cost-effective video contribution model. The pairing of Haivision’s advanced
encoding technology with the Zixi platform in a turnkey solution has allowed ONN to shift from costly
satellite contribution to high-speed IP video delivery over the public Internet ― without otherwise
altering its working environment or processes.

Haivision is the world’s leading vendor of

high-performance H.264 encoders,
codecs, and IP video systems. The
Barracuda™ is Haivision’s most compact
and affordable H.264 encoder that
incorporates advanced features such as
HiLo-Streaming™, Multi-StreamingTM, forward error correction (FEC), and encryption capabilities. The
Barracuda provides flexible low-latency SD encoding and is compatible with industry-standard set-top
boxes, it supports SDI, S-video, and composite video inputs and is available in three form factors: as
a stand-alone appliance, in a high-density 1U rack-mount chassis holding up to 6 Barracudas or in a
4U chassis holding as many as 21 Barracuda mini-blade encoders. With less than 70 ms of encoding
latency, its solid performance, and its small size, the Barracuda encoder is ideal for real-time
applications and is an appealing alternative to larger, more expensive, power-hungry broadcast
encoding systems for a wide array of video distribution applications.

Zixi’s platform turns high-speed Internet and Intranet connections into Instant
Video Delivery Networks (IVDNs), making any Web site or corporate network
a broadcasting hub with SD to HD capabilities. For a fraction of the cost of
traditional long-haul video delivery methods such as CDN, satellite, or
dedicated or leased lines, Zixi delivers SD and full HD quality video in real time to anywhere in the
world on any device using existing network infrastructure. The Zixi platform uses end-to-end, real-time

Copyright © 2010 Zixi, Llc. All rights reserved.

clock synchronization that enables timely delivery and recovery of lost packets, ensuring low or zero
latency delivery of HD video over standard IP connections without quality of service guarantees and
without any tradeoffs among resolution, pauses for re-buffering, and startup delay, making the system
ideal for ONN.

Haivision’s low-latency H.264 codec combines with Zixi’s advanced video delivery technology to
provide ONN with a cost-effective and easily scalable solution for video contribution. Video from the
ONN studio is encoded by two Barracuda encoders, sent to the Zixi Feeder and Broadcaster, which
sends the signal over the public Internet to Zixi Receiver units installed at each of the fifteen head end
locations. There, the stream is processed by a decoder, which provides SD-SDI video for cable
broadcast. This solution boasts no packet loss and low jitter and provides 24/7 always-on
performance, which ONN engineers can manage and monitor through the platform’s intuitive
interface.

Pat Ingram, Director of Engineering at ONN states: “We relied on satellite delivery at 9
Mbps for nearly 15 years, but now with Haivision’s remarkably efficient H.264 encoding
and Zixi’s content broadcast and media management hub, we can deliver the same quality
signal over a standard IP connection using a third of the bandwidth. Without changing
any part of our production workflow, we’ve been able to realize reliable, real-time point-to-
multipoint delivery at a fraction of the cost of our earlier long-haul video delivery model.”

The installation at ONN demonstrates how simply broadcasters can employ advanced encoding and
delivery solutions to realize significant cost savings with virtually no impact on operations or video
quality.

Copyright © 2010 Zixi, Llc. All rights reserved.