Bonding and Multicasting for Remote Production

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Anthony Burokas: To keep an internet connectivity glitch from taking you down, consider a bonded internet connection. At the low end, software like Speedify can give your computer two or more concurrent internet connections to help maintain reliability in tough situations.

How does streaming work when you're connecting over cellular? Kind of the same way, except your latency is more, and you've got to have a good solid cellular connection.

There are also hardware solutions that include bonding services. One of them is Peplink with their SpeedFusion technologies. But beware those devices that seem to offer multiple wide-area network connections to the internet, because many of them are just doing load balancing, as in putting different tasks on different connections, not spreading the one stream across all the connections at the same time. Very different solutions, very different results.

Bonding requires a server and a service at the other end to put your video stream packets that came across multiple networks back into the order that they were sent before passing them onto the destination server. If there's no bonding service specifically listed on that receiving end or being charged for, there may not be true bonding at all.

Several companies focus on bonded video uplink--just the video uplink, not bonding internet. LiveU and Teradek both offer a range of dedicated hardware that ties into their cloud services to offer bonding and multicasting capabilities. Teradek offers a lighter ShareLink service as well as their larger Core service, which offers a lot more capability for managing multiple ingest and multiple destinations at the same time. LiveU Offers a range of uplink and even bonded downlink hardware and services.

Another solution for streaming to multiple places is using a cloud service to allow you to send a single upload at a higher bit rate to multiple destinations. This is called multicasting. One of them is called Castr. Another one is, as we mentioned before, Restream. they are purpose-built to do this. Some content delivery networks like Vimeo also offer multicasting as part of a much larger suite of services that they offer. Resi tweaks the recipe by using a special protocol or hardware for stream resiliency and buffering with the caveat of an additional delay of about two minutes from sending it to the recipient screen.