Schooner Capital Leads $4 Million Investment in Funding Round for Zixi

Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, the industry leader of online cloud HDTV broadcasting, Zixi, has announced on April 12, 2011, that it has secured $4 million in additional funding found led by Schooner Capital. Other investors who participated in this funding round include prominent private investors who are veterans in the broadcasting industry from the time cable television was released. These investors are the former CEO and chairman of Scientific Atlanta, Sidney Topol, and one of the first cofounders and CEOs of CNN, the founder and president of the Food Network, Maurice Schonfeld, who is commonly known as Reese to his friends and colleagues.

Zixi was founded in 2006 and has quickly become the leader in creating one of the first broadcast quality HDTV portals for the internet and cloud computing organizations. One of the great benefits that Zixi has brought to the multibillion dollar broadcasting industry is that broadcast companies can deliver high quality HDTV videos for videos and movies on demand at a much lower cost than that of most of the movies on demand and pay per view services which many broadband cable companies offer today. What makes Zixi’s product stand out and disrupt the broadcasting industry is that its proprietary technology has allowed a wide variety of different companies that range from large enterprises to mass media broadcasting companies to offer video on demand services for movie viewing at the consumer’s leisure, as well as for live uninterrupted real-time broadcasting in HD quality over the internet for a fraction of the cost that most companies pay for conventional services that have been in the industry for over a decade.

Zixi has services that are specified for everyone in the broadcasting industry or in need for video for training films and video conferencing. For broadcasters in the entertainment industry and mass media, Zixi offers live vivid color broadcasting solutions that provide HD quality video on a cloud system which can be accessed over the internet. The software that Zixi offers broadcasting companies allows them to broadcast full HD quality video worldwide over the internet. With the advent of high tech TV sets on the market, which are a combination of both a TV set and the internet, more people are both watching TV and surfing the internet in their living room with a keyboard and mouse attached to the family television. The technology that Zixi provides gives consumers the added ability to watch a wide variety of different programming online at the same quality of their favorite TV programs. This will definitely seal the future for internet TV and possibly transform the merger of both TV and the internet in the future.

As the internet has been bringing in an astronomical number of different video services which can provide everything from marketing videos to news, sports, and entertainment for select consumer tastes, well, Zixi’s technology can benefit these services as well. Even on existing broadband networks, many users have often experienced all the troubles of watching videos online that can range from jitters, buffering, and frame freezes. Zixi’s technology still allows online video services to use the same broadband that most cable companies offer at the same bandwidth, but with a much higher quality picture and without any of the buffering, frame freezes and jitters used by many of the commonplace online video portals used today. This means that users are able to watch HD quality video clips from a wide variety of different websites.

Enterprises and multinational corporations who need to have teleconferences and real-life training videos for new employees can also benefit from special technology developed by Zixi. The HD quality video technological platform that Zixi provides can help corporate meetings that span on several different continents with high HD quality video for video conferencing and the accurate showing of graphs and other business graphics when executives in different corporate branches worldwide need to collaborate and work together.

According to the managing director of Schooner Capital, Ted Henderson, Zixi first got the attention of the team at Schooner Capital by seeing the wide variety of clientele that the company has acquired because of its unique platform. The end-to-end HDTV quality video portal that Zixi provides not only allows large media companies and online video services to deliver high quality video for news and entertainment purposes, but also allows for enterprises and corporations to use the technology to have superior quality video conferences in real time which never has the same issues that most internet video portals have online today. Mr. Henderson further added that with this high quality technology and many long term customers who are ecstatic about the high quality video that Zixi’s portal provides, the potential of the high ROI made the company very attractive to the team at Schooner Capital.

The CEO and founder of Zixi, Israel Drori further stated that he is very pleased by the additional funding provided by Schooner Capital and the other participating investors, who are prominent figures in the broadcasting and media industries, as it will help the company to continue to develop its amazing HD quality video portal that can be transmitted across the regular public and private internet.

The broadcasting and media veterans also extolled Zixi and stated their reasons for investing in the company. According to Mr. Topol, the thing that made Zixi stand out to him was that its disruptive technology and software is poised to revolutionize the way video and television is broadcast in the future. As a pioneer in satellite communications and RF technologies before becoming a key executive of Scientific Atlanta, where he worked in leadership roles for 19 years. During Mr. Topol’s tenure at Scientific Atlanta, the company grew a massive profit, raking in over $600 million in revenues.

Since its inception in 1971, Schooner Capital is a private investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, has lead investments in a wide range of different media and communications industries and stages of a company’s life. The primary focus, however, is in the cable television industry. Other companies in Schooner’s portfolio include Seventh Generation, RailComm, Milestone Medical Outsourcing, Colo Rail Road Builder, and others.