Video: How the Cellular Bonding Live Workflow Works

Learn more about cellular bonding solutions at Streaming Media's next event.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

George Klippel: If you don't know what cellular bonding is, real;y simply, it's a pack, like you see on this gentleman's backpack here, where you connect a camera to the unit, either SDI or HDMI. What we use is cellular bonding technology plus WiFi or ethernet. We connect all those modems, bond them together, and send the signal over the internet to either a physical server or a cloud server, and then send that signal out to your broadcast, to your web via SDI, NDI, H.264, H.265, if you will.

We have a nice portfolio of products that include the field units, which are essentially the encoders that take the video and convert it into IP packets. We have decoders for 1080 streaming as well as 4K streaming. We have smart apps for your cellphone. Everything that we do is managed in the ecosystem that we call LiveU Central. That gives you total control of all of these field units and what you do and how you use them from anywhere in the world. Sebastian's going to show you that in just a few moments.

Then, the secret sauce for LiveU: You kind of get an understanding of how the quality is, whether it's an entry-level system or a high-end system, is what we call LiveU Reliable Transport (LRT). It does these four things: packet ordering, forward error correction, acknowledge and resend, and adaptive bit rate encoding. This is what we're known for. Instead of reading through all these things here on the next slide, it'll outline it in a graph which is a little bit easier to understand.

The top line is what's called the aggregated available network bandwidth. The line right below it is the actual video bitrate. The audio bitrate in a LiveU environment is always in sync and always consistent. The first circle you'll see appear is where you see a network fluctuation, it dips down. It's kind of like going from four bars down to two bars in your cellphone, if you will. The actual bitrate of the video goes down with it.

The next circle, you'll see the video bitrate goes up. That's because the network bandwidth went back up. Just kind of like a wave, the LRT is able to go up and down just in real-time to accommodate for the network bandwidth. When the bandwidth or the network drops out again, our video bitrate drops out along with it, but we still are able to stream with in sync video and audio. That's what LRT does.

Other systems that are out there, that make you set a consistent bitrate, they would stop streaming if the bitrate or the available bandwidth went down. That's the secret sauce behind LiveU, and it's available on all of our products, no matter which ones you actually use.

The other thing that we're talking about today, and what we're going to show you, is our product called the LiveU Solo. It's one of our most popular sellers. It comes in a couple of different flavors, HDMI-only for under $1,000 and SDI and HDMI for around $1500. It's one of the biggest-use products that we have out there. It benefits both input and output workflows. You can connect it at HDMI or SDI to any type of camera that you want. It can bond the system with WiFi, ethernet or cellular modems and go out to any of these destinations that you see here, RTMP as well, multiple destinations simultaneously.

People from the networks are using this to online organizations, house of worship, education institutions, etc. In addition to just going out from a camera, you can also go out from a switched feed, from a TriCaster or a Blackmagic ATEM. You can take a switched feed multi-camera input, if you will, from that unit and do the exact same thing.