The best of both worlds in live production
By: Ronen Artman, VP of Marketing, LiveU
Leave no stone unturned is a phrase based on an ancient Greek legend and it absolutely applies to LiveU and how we’re continuing to look at every, single way we can possibly help customers serve their markets most efficiently. As we continue to grow our solution portfolio, increasing our cloud capabilities and related ecosystem of services – more of which below – we are also disrupting the market in other, innovative ways, too. Enter our new On-site Production Solution.
Having forever changed the way we understand, and are able to achieve, content acquisition, bringing previously unheard-of levels of dynamism and mobility to the news and sports markets, we are now further disrupting the market for on-site production, leveraging our experience in remote production (REMI).
Presented for the first time at NAB 2023, our new On-site Production Solution takes what we have learnt from remote production workflows – and our previous work on-site – to usher in a new era of outside broadcasting, specifically for live sports and other event driven verticals.
As we all know, traditional multi-camera on-site productions are expensive and complex to set up, requiring radio frequency (RF) equipment, antennas, cables and pre-sourced internet capabilities to be deployed. In contrast, LiveU’s new on-site solution offers unmatched efficiency at a very cost-effective price point. It enables bonded wireless transmission from the field straight into the production truck in a single click, with no need for a fixed internet connection.
The solution includes LiveU’s multi-cam/compact 5G 4K field units, and Mobile Receiver in the OB truck. Live video is transmitted directly from the units to the OB truck in a highly resilient manner without the need for cables, fixed internet or complex networking configurations. The responsiveness of a local control room creating a program feed is maintained, while avoiding much of the cost associated with setting up complex, traditionally connected workflows. The live feeds are transferred via the public internet and the LU-Link cloud service as part of a seamless workflow.
Built from the ground up to optimise the performance benefits of LRT™ (LiveU Reliable Transport) such as low latency, high-quality, resilience and 5G, LiveU’s latest solution means on-site production is no longer only viable for the big leagues.
An early customer of the new solution, Sam Schrade, President, DNA Studios LLC, said, “The solution works fantastically and opens up a lot of creative use cases. We used it at Astros Baseball Park as a wireless camera, and even brought it into the depths of the stadium – places RF systems often struggle with. The simple set-up, and not needing a port forwarding requirement in a stadium, is a huge bonus, especially as opening up ports at major league stadiums is next to impossible. It’s a much-needed tool, as RF channels are really not available anyway; they are pretty much all used up and it’s difficult to source them these days."
Of course, we’re also continuing our cloud journey, central to the future of the industry, announcing that we’ve joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN). This follows our successful completion of the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) process, where our cloud management platform software, LiveU Central, met the AWS standards for reliability, stability, security and operational excellence.
Joining the APN allows us to work more effectively with AWS and offer customers cost-effective, flexible and feature rich cloud video workflows. Customers will be able to benefit from innovative "ground-to-cloud" video solutions using LiveU’s portable encoders managed by LiveU Central as the unified management tool, powered by AWS. Bringing greater agility to cloud-based workflows allows customers to shorten time-to-live and to manage live video from anywhere, using the self-orchestration capabilities.
LiveU’s solutions are built on the LRT™ (LiveU Reliable Transport) protocol, ensuring high resiliency video and audio transmission and low latency across the most challenging bandwidth conditions.
Part of the LiveU EcoSystem, our On-Site Production Solution will be showcased at the 2023 NAB Show in Las Vegas (Booth #N3058). Executives will be on-hand to discuss our AWS partnership in more detail, too. We’d be delighted to take people on a guided tour of this solution at NAB or online.
To schedule a meeting, visit: https://get.liveu.tv/nab2023/.