LiveU – Alliance for Community Media (ACM) Annual Conference Recap

Blog authored by Ben Ratner, Global Solution Sales Specialist at LiveU

Hey – I’m Ben from LiveU. More importantly, I’m a two-time Hometown Media Award winner!

In case you missed our demo at the Alliance for Community Media (ACM) National annual conference, the two most popular solutions showcased were our traditional LiveU field encoders and LiveU Studio with an enhanced feature set. I was at the conference with our partners at Key Code Media – and enjoyed getting to meet attendees and learning about their productions and workflows. It’s amazing what content creators can produce – often with limited resources and crews!

LiveU Encoders
LiveU is known for getting a live video signal from anywhere! Our technology leverages cellular bonding to combine multiple cellular providers – Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, to make sure our customers have a reliable transmission – even without an ethernet connection. For PEG stations, this is great for getting a live video feed from government meetings throughout the city, going live from a high school football game, or broadcasting an annual parade live to the entire community.

Our LiveU LU300S makes it possible! Simply plug in a HDMI or SDI source and start transmitting in seconds. Users can either bring feeds back to the control room using one of our physical servers, or use our new LiveU Studio cloud control room, which I’ll tell you more about next. We also have a LiveU LU800 field unit for stronger bandwidth with more cellular connections and an entry-level LiveU Solo PRO that lets you broadcast directly to the web. And if you work in public safety, we have a brand new LiveU LU- REQON1 that’s specifically designed for law enforcement drone operations in mind.

So how does this work with without Ethernet or WiFi? Let’s say there’s not a lot of Verizon service where the customer is – or too many people are using all their bandwidth, we’ll rely on the other cellular providers. This uses our protocol called LiveU Reliable Transport™ (LRT™) to make sure broadcasts go off without a hitch. And if a customer has multiple cameras and multiple LiveU field units – we make sure to sync up all the feeds so producers can do a professional multi-camera broadcast from anywhere.

LiveU Studio
Now lets talk about LiveU Studio! As I mentioned before, it’s a full control room in the cloud. All the user needs is Google Chrome and they’re good to go! It can do everything the existing control room can do – it has a switcher, media players, instant replay, graphics, remote guests, direct feeds from LiveU, and so much more.

What are the benefits to running this in the cloud? For starters – users can be anywhere! They’re not tied to the confines of the existing studio. It only takes one person to operate LiveU Studio – but a station can also have multiple people in multiple locations helping out. For example – someone can be running audio, someone can be directing, and someone can be running the instant replay. Also – we can spin up as many cloud control rooms as the client needs – so if they have a particularly busy day, they can balance multiple productions! Customers don’t need to invest in a whole separate expensive control room.

LiveU Studio is super easy to use – and allows users to go live in just minutes. With up to 30 destinations – users can stream to all the popular social media sites, and bring the feed back to the ground for broadcast to linear channels.

I barely even scratched the surface of what LiveU has to offer! To learn more, reach out to us and we’d love to give you more information and a live demo.