SRT Cloud vs Zixi: A Zixi Alternative Built for Simple SRT Distribution

If you distribute live video for a living, Zixi needs no introduction. It is one of the most widely deployed transport platforms in professional broadcast, and if you have landed on a page about a Zixi alternative you have almost certainly used it, inherited it, or been quoted for it. This is an honest comparison written from the other side of the table. We will give Zixi full credit for what it genuinely does well — and it does a great deal well — then explain where a deliberately narrow, cloud-native service like SRT Cloud takes a simpler and cheaper path.

What is Zixi?

Zixi is a software-defined video platform for reliable live video transport and distribution over IP. At its heart is the Zixi protocol, a proprietary transport that — like SRT — leans on forward error correction and adaptive bitrate techniques to carry broadcast-grade video across lossy networks, the public internet included. Around that protocol Zixi has built considerably more. It interoperates with the open standards, SRT and RIST among them, and it runs the Zixi Enabled Network (ZEN): a large managed mesh of media-aware nodes and partners that can route a feed around the world under a service-level agreement. It is proven at the very top of the industry, carrying tier-1 live sport and breaking news for some of the biggest broadcasters on air.

In short, Zixi is not one product but an ecosystem — protocol, software, and a managed network — aimed at enterprises that need guaranteed delivery across complex, global topologies.

Zixi's genuine strengths

Any fair Zixi vs SRT conversation has to start by acknowledging why so many broadcasters standardised on it:

• The largest installed base in broadcast distribution. Zixi has been at this for well over a decade, and its footprint across broadcasters, operators, and cloud platforms is enormous. If your partners already speak Zixi, that reach is real value.
• Battle-tested reliability. The protocol and its hybrid FEC and ARQ recovery have been hardened on the most demanding live events there are. When a championship final is riding on the link, that track record matters.
• A deep partner ecosystem. Encoders, cloud vendors, and service providers ship Zixi support out of the box, so interoperability across a large plant is rarely the thing that blocks you.
• Managed-network SLAs. ZEN lets you buy delivery as a guaranteed service across regions — a genuine differentiator when contractual uptime, not just best-effort transport, is the requirement.

If your problem is mission-critical, multi-region delivery with contractual guarantees and heavy protocol handling, Zixi is a credible, serious choice, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Where SRT Cloud takes a different path

SRT Cloud is not trying to be an everything platform. It does one job, on purpose, and it does it without a single appliance or agent to deploy.

You send one SRT input. SRT Cloud produces unlimited bit-exact, 1:1 copies and delivers each one to a taker — a downstream destination such as a broadcaster, telco, affiliate, CDN, or satellite operator. There is no transcoding and no re-encoding: every output is frame-for-frame identical to your source. Takers on the platform today include FreeSat, Pyur, Eutelsat, SES, Etisalat, Swisscom, UIG, and KiwiSat.

Two design choices set it apart. First, it is built on open-standard SRT end to end — nothing proprietary to license, and any SRT-capable encoder or receiver simply works. Second, there is nothing to install. Zixi's model typically means deploying and licensing software — Feeder, Broadcaster, and Receiver components, or Zixi-enabled devices — and operating them across your network or through ZEN. SRT Cloud is a managed cloud service: no software on your side beyond the encoder you already own, nothing to patch, and no media server to babysit.

The whole idea is subtraction, not addition: one open-standard feed in, unlimited exact copies out, and a bill that tracks the number of partners you actually serve.

Side-by-side comparison

The pricing difference, in plain terms

Zixi does not publish list pricing. Like most enterprise transport platforms it is sold as a negotiated, contract-based arrangement — commonly framed around connections, appliances or nodes, and annual commitments — so any specific figure you see quoted online is guesswork. Rather than invent numbers, compare on the model and the total cost of ownership: software to license and operate, network capacity to commit to, and procurement cycles to clear.

SRT Cloud inverts that. Pricing is €99 per output per month — one license equals one SRT output — after a free trial, with no long-term commitment and the freedom to scale up or down anytime. Ten takers, ten outputs; lose two, drop to eight next month. Your bill tracks your business rather than your procurement forecast.

For a public reference point on what cloud output distribution costs at list price, AWS Elemental MediaConnect publishes roughly $0.08 per output-hour, which works out to about $290 a month for a single output running 24×7, before data transfer. SRT Cloud comes in well under that per output. Treat that as an illustration of cloud pricing in general, not a claim about Zixi's rates, which remain private.

What you give up — and what you don't

Honesty matters here. SRT Cloud is not a managed private network and it is not a protocol-conversion suite. There is no ZEN-style, SLA-backed global mesh, no proprietary FEC transport to tune, and no multi-protocol bridging between SRT, RIST, RTMP, RTP and the rest. If your workflow genuinely needs those — guaranteed cross-region routing under contract, or heavy format and transport conversion inside the path — Zixi is the better fit, and SRT Cloud will sit alongside it rather than pretend to replace it.

What you do not give up is fidelity. Because nothing is re-encoded, there is no generational loss, no added latency from a transcode stage, and every taker receives exactly the feed you sent. For pure distribution, sameness is the feature.

So which should you choose?

Choose Zixi if you need managed-network SLAs across regions, mission-critical tier-1 delivery with contractual guarantees, or heavy multi-protocol handling inside your distribution path. It has earned its place at the top of the market.

Choose SRT Cloud if your actual problem is the one it was built for: you have one live SRT feed and need to hand identical copies to a growing list of downstream partners — simply, cheaply, and without deploying or operating anything. No appliance, no agent, no transcode, no commitment. Just one feed in, unlimited exact copies out, at €99 per output. When that is the job, the narrower tool wins.