Among the vendors defining a post-pandemic video technology ecosystem is LiveU, a company renowned for its HEVC bonding units housed within cellular backpacks for remote production.
Despite the US-based IP transmission specialist’s entire engineering team being uprooted from development labs to home, the company still managed to push out a new product launch this week.
LiveU is pushing to make mobile bonding units mainstream, by adding remote production capabilities and 5G connectivity. The big question is, even with all the bells and whistles, can LiveU usurp the established broadcasting equipment providers once big crews are allowed to convene together again in live production environments, or is the company happy being more of a reliable back-up technology for live sports and news?
A live-streamed LiveU press conference last week revealed the LU800, a monster multi-camera production level field unit, supporting up to four fully frame-synced feeds in high resolution from a single unit, using powerful IP bonding of up to 14 connections. Live HEVC encoding enables up to 4Kp60 10-bit HDR transmission for optimal color depth and richness, and the LU800 comes with two WiFi interfaces, unlimited camera angles, remote at-home production capabilities, up to 16 audio channels, and two bidirectional communications channels.
What LiveU has produced here is a taste of things to come for live sports and news in the 5G era, with the device built from the ground up around native 5G.
Brad Cheney, VP of field operations and engineering at Fox Sports, tapped into the live stream, explaining how – despite Fox Sports being bereft of live content at the moment – there is a desire to provide customized content from a single production unit as the sports industry slowly emerges from this pandemic.
“Fox Sports was one of the first to use 5G, for the US Open and the Superbowl, and the beauty of 5G is latency, so the LU800 allows for lower time to take content from the LU800 unit, to the network center, to the production unit, which is a huge gain for us. The ability to do 4K HDR gives us the ability to do new things from mobile units,” commented Cheney.
CBS News Editor Walt Leiding was also on hand, venting his own excitement about the ability to use multiple cameras with one unit. “We had seven cameras and seven LiveU units at the space station this week, so having multiple cameras with one link is a game-changer. The fact that we’ve moved into a new production model of anchors broadcasting from homes has opened doors to new opportunities, so the LU800 will help with multiple cameras in a single path,” said Leiding.
LiveU’s VP of Engineering, Daniel Pisarski, name-dropped AT&T, Verizon and Docomo as three mobile titans for which LiveU has delivered cellular bonding capabilities. The ai was to retrofit older units for 5G delivery, but LiveU soon found that building a new mobile unit tailor-made for the specific needs and features of 5G networks and 5G antennas, like millimeter wave spectrum, required building mobile units from the ground up, otherwise the LU800 might have arrived to market sooner, but at the cost of cutting 5G corners.
LiveU’s well-known dual-SIM technology bonds 5G networks with other networks including LTE, bringing lower latency, deterministic latency and higher throughput. The unit’s multi-camera production streams are fully managed by the LiveU Central cloud-based management platform, and streams are automatically fed into the LiveU Matrix IP content management and distribution workflow.
There are big advantages for production companies too. Scott Rehling, head of L2 Productions, noted how the organizers behind major festivals and music events are particularly interested in HDR and 4K production, which L2 can now deliver via the LU800 through higher end applications, using its existing workflows but producing higher quality images.
“We work at a lot of colleges with arenas where camera positions are tied to the infrastructure, so doing more of a hybrid model with our customers, using both our cameras and in-house cameras, using a single LiveU unit, is exciting,” commented Rehling.
Founded 14 years ago, it wasn’t until about 2015 that LiveU became fully visible with deals for its bonding transmission technology packed into lightweight backpacks, picking up steam at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, before going on to be acquired by private equity firms Francisco Partners and IGP Capital in May 2019.
Last year, Sinclair set the bar by upgrading all stations in 80 locations in the US to LiveU’s flagship model of HEVC field units for newsgathering, and its biggest deal of 2020 so far has come at China’s Tencent.
On home soil, LiveU has worked with AT&T during the past year to add 5G mobile connectivity to HEVC bonding portable broadcasting technology. LiveU has helped upgrade AT&T’s 4G LTE in LiveU’s existing units, where multiple cellular networks are bonded together, to 5G connectivity – delivering faster video with lower latency and improved features.