The Future of Remote Broadcasting
If you live in a city, you’ve seen the local NBC, CBS, ABC or FOX news truck parked somewhere, satellite dish pointed to the sky, ready for action. For example, last week Hillary Clinton spoke in front of the Federal Reserve here in NYC (a block from our studio) and the streets were packed with camera crews and trucks.
Each of these trucks has a satellite dish that broadcasts a video signal back to the home office for either live or on-demand broadcast. The dish has to have line of site to the satellite in the sky to broadcast the signal, which is why the trucks have the giraffe neck poles.
Now imagine that some dude rolls into the Hillary Clinton publicity conference with a camera and a back-pack, and nothing else. And he’s broadcasting a live video feed back to Jerusalem, Moscow, Rio or LA so the local news station can include coverage of our financial meltdown in their morning or nightly news coverage. No truck. No satellite. Just a camera and a back pack.
How’s he do it?
Well, he uses LiveU, the winner of my first annual MacGyver award. This is an impromptu award, actually inspired by LiveU. I will give a MacGyver award out each year to the coolest, MacGyver-like solution I see at the many technology, science, cleantech and media conferences I attend. I know the year’s not done, but I can’t imagine anything will top this. Plus, since LiveU inspired the award, I have to give it to them.
Simply put, imagine if you take 2 cell phones from ATT, 2 from Verizon, and 2 from Sprint and put them all in a box to aggregate their capacity. Then you create an intelligent software layer on top of all the cell phones that taps into their COMBINED bandwidth to send out data.
The beauty of multiple phones from multiple carriers is that when one carrier has a weak signal, you can rely on the strength of the other carriers in that location. If you’re in the San Jose convention center, as I was last week, and the Verizon signal is weak, no problem, the ATT & Sprint signals can pick up the slack.
Plug your camera into a laptop via firewire. The laptop has a small LiveU application installed on it, similar to Adobe Media Encoder. Plug the laptop into the liveU box (which has a rechargeable battery in case you’re not near a power source), and the LiveU box streams h.264 video back to a server in your facility, wherever that may be. The box disaggregates the broadcast feed, sends it to multiple cell towers from multiple carriers, and re-aggregates the feed on the other side. Intelligent packet routing engineered by Israeli engineers.
All I could think of when I first talked to the LiveU guys was “oh my god, this will kill the satellite industry with it’s distributed computing simplicity.” Need more capacity? Use 3 air cards from each carrier instead of two. Want to get even beefier? Add a fourth carrier.
My first thought was that as local news crews have to replace their current fleet of trucks, they will seriously consider replacing some trucks with LiveU units.
They will still use trucks and satellites to deal with mission critical field work, such as broadcasting the Super Bowl or a presidential debate. But LiveU can provide quality that is better than the broadcasts we are used to seeing from Christiana Amanpour reporting “live from Baghdad” for CNN. And we already accept that quality because we know it’s from hard core field locations. This is better quality - halfway between the Christiana Amanpour Baghdad broadcasts and Super Bowl HD. My assumption is that it will only get better (imagine when 3G is fully rolled out).
My bet is that as more news organizations - old and new school - add one or two LiveU kits to their mix, we’ll see an explosion of live event coverage of breaking news, or networks adding secondary crews in the field to get local stories that they wouldn’t normally send the main news truck to.
We’ll also see an explosion of niche, local event coverage, like the high school football game - a 3 camera shoot, mixed live, and streamed to the local TV station via LiveU.
What’s your MacGyver product of the year?
Peter Cervieri is co-founder of and Director of Business Development for ScribeMedia.Org. His fetish is collecting business cards.
Sweet. Me want.
Great write up! Another feature I found amazing is that the LiveU solution will work with any internet source, not just the wireless telcos.
If a wifi or wimax network is available it could be added to the mix for pushing the broadcast out.
nice..nice..Finally someone came out with right idea..Ok in US it’s not that hard to do live upstrim, but what about when we are out side..of US. It’s harder to find internet Connation when we are out side of US. I would look up on this soon. Thanks.