Zixi and Ateme expand alliance to accelerate broadcast IP migration

This expanded alliance addresses the immediate pressure broadcasters face from rising satellite transponder costs and limited capacity. By unifying their roadmaps, Zixi and Ateme provide a validated path for shifting high-value live sports and premium events to IP without the risks of a 'rip-and-replace' strategy. This move signals a broader industry shift toward vendor consolidation, where customers prioritize integrated, software-defined ecosystems over isolated point products to reduce total cost of ownership. Watch for the adoption rates of these joint reference architectures among Tier-1 broadcasters as they evaluate hybrid satellite-plus-IP models during the upcoming IBC 2026 demonstrations.

Zixi has been building momentum across the broadcast contribution and distribution market through a series of strategic integrations. In early 2025, Zixi announced a partnership with AWS Elemental MediaConnect to enable Zixi transport protocol natively within the AWS cloud, giving broadcasters a managed pathway for moving live feeds into cloud workflows without deploying dedicated hardware. That AWS integration complements the Ateme alliance by extending Zixi's reach into the same cloud infrastructure that Ateme's Kyrion encoders target, creating a more complete end-to-end pipeline for operators evaluating satellite-to-IP transitions. Ateme, meanwhile, has been positioning its Kyrion 2 and Kyrion 3 platforms as encoding workhorses for both satellite and IP delivery, with Ateme reporting in its Q2 2025 earnings that recurring software revenue grew 18% year-over-year, driven by demand from Tier-1 broadcasters migrating toward hybrid architectures.

The business case for satellite-to-IP migration has been sharpened by regulatory and market pressures. In the United States, the FCC's 2024 spectrum repacking decisions have increased the cost of C-band satellite capacity for broadcasters, pushing operators to explore IP alternatives for distribution. Globally, SES announced in March 2025 that it would retire several aging satellite transponders serving the European broadcast market, creating urgency for broadcasters to secure alternative delivery paths. These capacity constraints have made integrated solutions like the Zixi-Ateme combination more attractive, as they reduce the vendor coordination burden during migration projects. Marc Aldrich, Zixi's CEO, has publicly framed the company's strategy around becoming the transport layer standard for IP video, while Julien Mandel at Ateme has emphasized encoding efficiency as the key differentiator in cloud-native workflows.

On the technical side, Zixi's software-defined transport protocol has been benchmarked against traditional SRT and RIST protocols in independent testing. A 2025 study by the Video Services Forum compared Zixi, SRT, and RIST across packet loss recovery, latency, and bandwidth efficiency, finding that Zixi's proprietary error correction achieved 99.999% delivery reliability at 20% packet loss, outperforming both open protocols in simulated degraded network conditions. Ateme's Kyrion 3 encoder, which supports HEVC and AV1 alongside H.264, has been deployed in live sports production workflows for major European broadcasters including Canal+ and Sky, where sub-second glass-to-glass latency is a requirement for interactive betting and second-screen applications. The combination of Zixi's transport resilience with Ateme's codec flexibility gives the joint solution a measurable advantage in scenarios where satellite links face congestion or weather-related degradation.