Streaming live video from exotic locations is one of the reasons that we love what we do! From the F1 circuit in Bahrain for Cisco, to the revolving restaurant atop the BT Tower for Legg Mason, we have a wide experience in locations that are not generally open to the public. Whilst you’d expect the F1 circuit at Bahrain and BT Tower to have excellent connectivity, and hence provide us with all the bandwidth and stability we need in a connection to deliver our clients’ content, there are often times when this simply isn’t the case.
Take, for example, the humanist funeral we streamed from woodland in the Oxfordshire countryside, miles from the nearest building, let alone a place to plug in an ethernet cable (or mains power!) We had to find a way to stream high quality video from multiple cameras with mixed audio so that the to-be-interred’s elderly relatives could watch from as far afield as the US and Australia. For this undertaking we were able to make best use of our economical, low power draw cameras and audio equipment which could all run on battery power, and software-based video switching on a high-performance laptop.
To transmit the signal we made excellent use of our battery-powered portable multiple-bonded-mobile-SIM video encoder, the LiveU Solo Plus. This unit has two internal 4G modems (like having two mobile phones inside it) and can have another two USB modem dongles attached allowing us to have one mobile phone SIM card from each major network: EE, Three, Vodafone and O2 or, where we know the signal from one or more of the networks is poor, multiple SIMs from the network(s) we know to have a good signal. This clever little box, which can be carried in a backpack or attached to a belt, sends the encoded audio and video data out on each of these SIM connections and, using a bonding server in ‘the cloud,’ combines them into one single stream that can be delivered via the likes of YouTube, Facebook Live, Twitch or a proprietary video service. We have found it ultra-reliable and relatively simple to use.
Whilst it seems obvious that we would need a mobile phone SIM-based solution to allow us to stream from a field, bizarrely we have similar needs right in the centre of The City of London. Financial Results season often sees us streaming company results as part of their Investor Relations (IR) and often these events take place in the conference facilities of large banks. Banks have a tendency to be very particular in who they allow access to their IT networks, and what sort of traffic they allow. More often than not, they will have a guest WiFi network, but they tend to be heavily locked down to standard internet traffic only, no video streaming (RTMP traffic) allowed!
Again, we turn to the LiveU Solo Plus for streaming. We can couple this with our 5G mobile broadband router which provides an additional bonded high speed streaming path for the video and audio, as well as giving all of our other computer equipment an unrestricted connection, which is incredibly useful, and even provides a similar (and potentially more capable) guest wifi connection for our clients!
In places where mobile signal might be weak, the LiveU can even bond a connection to an IP satellite service such as Starlink. Starlink is Elon Musk’s “constellation” of low-Earth orbit satellites to provide world-wide internet access to users, which is very useful for remote areas without ground infrastructure. I would caveat and say that for the best video quality and resolution, we have had some variable results with Starlink, but used as an additional bonding solution where other connections are poor, Starlink is a great back up. And that’s the key to our reliability and dependability – having alterative solutions in our back pocket to fall back on whatever the situation we find ourselves in.