Live Streaming Gear at NAB 2025: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Cue up Daft Punk for this year's NAB:

Work it, make it, do it, makes us
Hard-er, bett-er, fast-er, strong-er

While trade tariff wars loomed outside the halls for NAB 2025, inside on the show floors, and in various locations around the Las Vegas Convention Center, and in the cloud—because some companies feel the need to pre-announce their new gear so you go to the show knowing what you want to check out—the message was all about doing more, faster, better.

Cloud solutions continue to be more integrated and deliver more capability, locally and remotely, although my stance is still that the local truck can be your cloud, and not having to cram it full of people makes things easier. For tasks separated between trucks, like graphics, etc., those can be run by remote crew for which you don't incur any travel or per-diem costs. Cloud-connected comms make it feel they're right there, 20 feet from you.

All-in-Ones

Small, all-in-one solutions continue to evolve. I've been covering such solutions, including iPad-based studios, since 2018. Every year there's ever-more capability being crammed into devices you can easily carry with you - with innovative new products being shown from YoloLiv, Magewell, BirdDog, and more. Not to mention faster processors, faster RAM, "neural processing" and faster connections. So let’s take a look.

YoloLiv introduced their latest YoloBox Extreme which packs an unheard of eight physical HDMI inputs and two HDMI outputs into an 11" Android Tablet with their customary ease of use and Yolo-based ecosystem of multicasting and content delivery network as well. Yolo pushes the limit of what AIO tablet production can do with full 4K UHD production with multiple 4K inputs through 4K recording, replay, and delivery as well.

YoloLiv Yolobox Extreme

Magewell showed the evolution of their Director Mini with a new model called the Director One. Rather than something completely different, it's more of an evolutionary "Director+" model with the same functionality, but one that adds (+) the most user-requested capabilities. Key among them are:

• internal cellular
• a larger and brighter screen
• dedicated full-size HDMI output
• and replaceable external antennas that enable users to make the most of the added cellular and the ability to share that via WiFi hotspot to create a wireless local area network wherever you may be. 

Magewell Director One

BirdDog, known for NDI cameras and converters, as well as some software "glue" that connects things together, started another tab on their website with the introduction of the MAKI Studio Control Surface that includes the MAKI Studio app (iOS only) to take in several NDI sources, as well as mix, title, record, and stream. Kind of an "All In One" live streaming production studio, except it’s two pieces. The software comes with the hardware control surface, which makes working with the AIO software on the iPad more production friendly. It's not one or the other, it's both. And. despite the name, no MAKI camera is required.

BirdDog MAKI Studio Control Surface

Cloud Connectivity

NDI, BirdDog, and PTZ Optics also all furthered their push into cloud connectivity.

NDI-6’s hardware Bridge enables full-featured, encrypted NDI streams over your WAN without having to dedicate a computer to be the bridge. BirdDog introduced BirdDog Connect. A collection of apps which integrate NDI and SRT to bridge multiple networks with ultra-low latency video for productions.

PTZ Optics introduced HIVE, which takes this one step further with cloud studio control rooms, where you can easily manage multiple cameras, in multiple locations and also manage your multiple operators in each HIVE. Each of these solutions enables a production to send a camera to a distant location, and when it gets plugged in and can see the internet, it's remotely controllable and can deliver video wherever needed.

PTZOptics HIVE

Add to this the widening availability of reliable broadband, terrestrial, cellular, and satellite, and you have the ability to deploy nearly anywhere on the planet and be able to reliably connect to the internet. Bonding systems continue to mature, both for video and for complete data systems.

So now, not only can crew be remote to the studio, gear can be remote as well. Enabling completely distributed production with anything being anywhere—quite the evolution while we see so many companies require employees to return to the office. Productions realize that what is essentially "Work From Home" remote workers, and remote gear can deliver the best people, and powerful systems, faster, cheaper, and with reliability.

Now the real question becomes, where do we go from here?

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