We could brainstorm a long list of companies that this time last year would probably not be in positions to be pondering acquisitions, but have successfully surfed the Covid-19 video wave to the point where writing checks is necessary to maintain momentum. One of those is remote production specialist LiveU, which has followed up a phenomenal year for the industry it serves by snapping up UK-based reseller Garland Partners for an undisclosed fee – in a deal that throws down the gauntlet to manufacturers of products supporting SRT, RIST and Zixi.
Garland has wasted absolutely no time in filling its website store with LiveU products, effectively cutting off Garland as a channel partner for rivals by making it a LiveU exclusive shopfront. In fact, such is the efficiency of this takeover that you would be hard fought to find out what exactly it was Garland did before being bought by LiveU. But if you don’t ask, you don’t get, and Faultline was informed by a representative that Garland used to sell products from a number of different encoder vendors that supported SRT, RIST and Zixi, as well as some streaming encoders.
However, these were all removed post haste only the night before the acquisition was announced to avoid giving off mixed messages to the market. In other words, Garland did overnight what takes some companies months of heel-dragging to execute.
The real reason for acquiring a channels partner like Garland is for LiveU to promote its LRT (LiveU Reliable Transport) proprietary patented protocol – i.e. its “secret sauce”. LRT has been developed to adapt transmitters to internet delivery and deliver reliable live video streaming over unreliable IP networks, including cellular.
It sounds identical to what SRT and RIST have been developed to solve, and Garland’s Technical Manager David Fowler explained to Faultline that LRT uses network bonding across SIMs/ethernet/WiFi and adapts to the available bandwidth across all data paths. Of course, SRT is an open source protocol that supports resending of any lost packets, while RIST is much the same but is a standardized protocol, with SRT and RIST each coming with their own pros and cons.
“They are both encoder agnostic so typically the encoder will not adapt to available bandwidth. There are some implementations with RIST/SRT where the encoder could do that, but it’s usually an integration of RIST or SRT as a protocol into an encoder, whereas LRT is at the core of the encoding engine within the LiveU product range,” Fowler explained.
Effectively, the deal takes LiveU closer to customers, cutting out another middleman by equipping it with the means to upsell its existing offerings of multi-camera production and IP cloud distribution systems. This includes the LiveU Solo video encoder, a wireless live streaming device that can be connected directly from cameras to platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch.
Garland indeed has an esteemed customer base, listing BT Sport, Sky Sports, Sky News, BBC, ITV, ITN, Channel 4 and 5, Eurosport, Discovery, and more.
Video production technology firms such as LiveU and Dejero have also been driven to integrating 5G into their transmission products.
Trials have been conducted in all regions around live sports especially, with NBC Sports, BT Sport and the BBC in the frame. Pay TV operator Sky Deutschland is a recent example, joining up with Telefónica O2 Deutschland to incorporate the 5G-Broadcast suite for a live sports production. This led to a demonstration in December 2020 of live coverage from the German Handball Bundesliga match using 12 standard 5G smartphones to transmit signals from around the stadium to provide a range of alternative camera angles.
LiveU’s smartphone kits were used for this 5G multi-cam sports broadcast, and Sky worked closely with local partner netorium to deploy LiveU-enabled smartphones for real-time encoding and upstreaming to multiple camera angles.
The quality might not have been quite as good as that taken by the principal dedicated camera, but was adequate to pan in the different views almost as clips, adding perspective to the coverage. As Alessandro Reitano, SVP of sports production at Sky Deutschland, put it, “The positioning and use of the 5G smartphones brings us completely new possibilities in capturing game situations. Our viewers can thus dive even deeper into the action in the Flens Arena.”
Such trials are not entirely confined to sports, with the Seoul Broadcasting System deploying LiveU’s 5G integrated encoding and transmission products for live coverage of South Korea’s recent election.
Could the likes of Zixi, VideoFlow and Aviwest respond to LiveU’s statement with acquisitions of their own?