Zixi launched in 2007 with the same goal SRT and RIST later took up — broadcast contribution over the public internet with bounded latency. The protocol is proprietary but widely licensed; encoder vendors like Haivision (ironically), AWS Elemental, Net Insight, Telestream and most others ship Zixi as one option alongside SRT and RIST. Zixi's combination of ARQ, dynamic FEC, hitless failover across multiple paths, and the ZEN Master orchestration platform made it the default choice for tier-1 broadcasters through the 2010s.
Zixi's persistence in 2026 is largely operational. Major broadcasters have years of investment in Zixi gear, ZEN Master integrations and monitoring tooling, and switching to an open protocol means re-engineering already-working contribution networks. New deployments increasingly choose SRT or RIST (open, no licensing fees), but Zixi remains the dominant choice in major-league sports contribution, large broadcaster news gathering, and event-production back-haul.
Engineering-wise, Zixi and SRT have nearly identical capabilities — both pick UDP, both expose a latency window, both add ARQ, both encrypt. The differentiator is the orchestration plane: Zixi sells the protocol bundled with ZEN Master (multi-site monitoring, automated routing, hitless seamless failover at the application level). For a buyer this can be the right choice; for a greenfield engineer it is increasingly the more expensive choice for similar capability.
