Building Resilience in Live Video Transmission: How LiveU Mitigates Single Points of Failure

A lot has been written about the recent CrowdStrike software update and how it crashed millions of Windows computers around the world. The outage was unprecedented in scale and had significant economic and operational consequences. Most notably it highlighted the vulnerability of global IT systems to a single point of failure (SPOF) and raised questions about the importance of mitigating the risk associated with SPOFs.

In the world of live video transmission, you get only one chance to go live. Therefore, mitigating the risks associated with a SPOF is crucial. LiveU solutions are used by customers in the broadcast and live sports production sectors, as well as by government agencies for public safety and emergency response communications. In critical situations, such as during natural disasters or public emergencies, our technology is relied upon to ensure that vital information can be communicated to the public without interruption.

Resilience at the core of IP bonding

The LiveU IP-video EcoSystem is built upon two of the most fundamental principles which mitigate the risk of SPOFs and build resilience: redundancy (having backup systems in place that are ready to take over if the primary one fails) and diversity (using multiple suppliers and integrating with multiple vendors). 

Video-over-Bonded-IP (VoBIP), a technology patented by LiveU (and also known as cellular bonding), was developed with these two principles at its core. It enables your wireless video transmission to leverage multiple connections from multiple providers to ensure signal throughput – even when conditions are challenging. 

Combining 4G and 5G signals, and optionally with Ethernet, WiFi, or satellite when available, ensures that if one connection is weak or fails, others can compensate, allowing continuous transmission. IP bonding is a mature technology and one that has evolved from being a fallback to one that is relied upon as a primary mode of video transmission. 

Redundancy reimagined

LiveU Reliable Transport, or LRT™, is the video and audio delivery protocol developed over the last decade by LiveU supporting low latency, high resiliency video and audio transmission. In particular, LRT™ is optimized to support the bonding of multiple IP connections.

Some video and audio delivery protocols focus on active-passive redundancy meaning there is always the risk of failure as you move from one connection to another. LRT™ benefits from active-active redundancy which means connections run simultaneously and switch seamlessly.

Forward Error Correction (FEC) is also an important technique used in video and audio delivery protocols to reduce the impact of packet loss and deliver a seamless viewing experience. FEC adds some overhead to the stream, with the idea that the small amount of additional overhead can be used to recover lost data faster than a resend. For example, 20% of additional stream bandwidth can result in enough redundancy that entire groups of lost packets can be recovered without ever requesting or waiting for a resend. LRT™ not only uses FEC, but it uses a dynamic version of FEC. This means that it automatically varies how much FEC to use based on monitored network conditions.

While these examples are specific to LRT™, our proprietary video and audio delivery protocol, LiveU has built redundancy into the entire video transmission workflow.

Multiple paths, minimal risk

When you’re thinking about building your mission-critical solutions in wireless video transmission and live broadcast in general, a diverse supplier base will inevitably reduce your risk of SPOFs. As highlighted previously, diversity of suppliers is a fundamental principle that sits at the very heart of IP bonding, as well as how LiveU’s systems are architected.

LiveU collaborates with multiple mobile network operators (MNO) and mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) through which our customers can tap into the mobile or wireless networks of multiple telecommunications providers. This removes the risks associated with a dependency on a single mobile or wireless network. Indeed, while the CrowdStrike outage affected at least one of our partner MVNOs, the diversity of networks available ensured that there were no issues reported by our customers with all our EcoSystem solutions working as usual. In some cases, our technology even stepped in to compensate for other broadcast systems which were affected.

You should be able to use a rich and diverse set of live streaming solutions and live broadcast tools to tell your stories. A good ecosystem will promote diversity, not just in terms of failover, but equally give you the creative options that come with a well architected system that seamlessly integrates with third parties from remote production to live streaming solutions.

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Our diverse, IP agnostic principles and the redundancy we build into our wireless video transmission protocol and workflows ensure that our customers achieve the best result possible.

Cellular data packages sit at the heart of IP bonding and with extensive experience handling over 10 petabytes of cellular data annually, LiveU has gained valuable expertise in optimizing data connections to support flawless live broadcasts. Read more here about how LiveU’s Mobile Data packages can help you, or contact our team of experts if we can help with your live video contribution, production or distribution requirements.