Streaming Spotlight: LiveU: Democratising Live Production

The LiveU unit is used in Israel by all of the broadcast stations. In the relatively small geographic region, Live U units are deployed around the country. This permits the traditional broadcast vehicles to be centrally located so that they can respond to each area as needed. This could be an extensible model for larger geographic areas that could be divided into service regions. Each of the regions could then be serviced by multiple LiveU units. Each of the larger geographic regions could be then be serviced by fewer broadcast trucks, thereby reducing costs while expanding the live coverage area with rapid deployment of the LiveU units.

A series of recent red carpet events illustrates both applications and partnerships evolving from the LiveU technology. I recently spoke with Max Haot, CEO of Livestream (formerly Mogulus) and Richard Aylmer-Hall of the U.K. Press Association, the U.K.’s leading multimedia news and information provider. The U.K. Press Association has conducted three live red carpet events from London for the U.K. spring premieres of Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. They began by using a laptop and Adobe Media Encoder over the public Wi-Fi network. When they sought a more-robust connection and distribution solution, they began using LiveU and Livestream. The LiveU unit was configured with air cards from T-Mobile, O2, and Vodafone.

Before using the LU-30 for the first time, Aylmer-Hall spent "most of the night" sitting up with his crew to make sure everyone understood how to use the unit. It wasn’t necessary as he was able to establish the live connection from the red carpet premiere of Transformers with the ease of a button press. The premiere of the latest Harry Potter movie proved to be a bit more interesting. Given the fanfare over the premiere and the crush of the global media, Aylmer-Hall was unable to secure access to the red carpet for himself. However, one of his video journalists did have red carpet access. Richard was able to show the journalist how to use the LiveU in "less than 20 minutes," and they were live from one of the most anticipated premieres of the season. Clearly, the LU-30 is compact enough to be used in the tight confines and media crush of a movie premiere.

While the LiveU unit has the capacity to broadcast at 2Mbps, the actual transmission used only 700Kbps–800 Kbps. You can view some of the on-demand highlights on Livestream at www.livestream.com/thepressassociation.

Livestream itself had been working with LiveU over the past year, and they announced their partnership at the Streaming Media East show in New York in May. Haot went on to say that "We’re increasingly interested in high-quality live streams from producers for large communities with high-value production crews and equipment such as sporting and political events. The high reliability of the LiveU technology helps fill the gap between Livestream and the customer." Livestream is also investigating a service option for their premium customers. Currently, users of the LiveU unit must open a port on their firewall to the local office or broadcast suite and then encode and serve the stream. Haot sees a possible solution by using a bridge server in the cloud. LiveU would provide an IP into the server, and the encoding and distribution into the client channels would be handled by Livestream. Beginning in September, Livestream began reselling the LU-30 and offering the end-to-end package under the Livepack brand.

While LiveU has a very unique product, there are a couple of items that users have mentioned as things they would like to see. They are not deal killers in my opinion—just some of the things users think about. It’s great that the LU-30 unit fits in a backpack, but what about other gear such as cameras and tripods? Certainly with a bit of thought, a user could come up with a suitable method for carrying the kit. And then there are always things that everyone wants in every product. These are, of course, a smaller size and quicker connections. I’m not sure how much faster you can get than a 1-minute setup, but I’d bet that it will eventually be faster. The unit size of technology regularly decreases, so I think we could expect to see some progress in that area in the future. And many of the new things that LiveU is adding to the product such as SDI connections represent significant steps in the versatility and value of the product.

Will it replace traditional satellite transmission? Probably not; at least not in the immediate future, given broadcasters’ significant investment in the well-established high-quality satellite technology. But it mitigates some of the issues involved and enhances the options available to the broadcaster. The LU-30 is another tool in the broadcaster’s toolbox. Its speed of deployment, ease of use, and time to air are true advantages. It is not a difficult task to get a single reporter to a news event to get the coverage started and then hand off the transmission when the broadcast truck arrives. While the LU-30 is not quite at the price that smaller web portals would prefer, it has significantly lowered the cost of entry to live global streaming. Even though the London premieres were successful in the technology application, Aylmer-Hall says that at some point a customer needs to see enough value to actually pay for the transmission and distribution bandwidth by wrapping the broadcast in advertising or some other monetization strategy.

But are there technology downsides? Well, it uses cellular networks and IP transmissions. It is not dedicated private bandwidth that could be reliably achieved by other methods, and there can be latency in IP networks. But it works; from the end user point of view, does the ease of use along with costs orders of magnitude lower than satellite represent significant value? I believe it does. It is not a panacea, but LiveU has made a significant contribution in advancing the technology and expanding the opportunity for high-quality live transmission to organizations and individuals who probably don’t have the deep pockets of traditional broadcast outlets. LiveU has made available technology that actually does lead toward the democratization of live video. I will try to get an LU-30 in the future and report on my field use of this unit and of some other applications of the technology. And maybe next time, I won’t fall in the well.

You can learn more about LiveU, the technology, and pricing options at http://liveu.tv.