TV newsrooms worldwide will soon be able to take live...
TV newsrooms worldwide will soon be able to take live video feeds in broadcast quality from consumers’ iPhones and Android devices using technology initially developed for professional camera operators by Israeli company LiveU. The technology works by “bonding” together several…
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different cellphone services to provide enough data capacity for 1080-quality video, LiveU said. Professional LiveU backpacks, costing upwards of $25,000 to $30,000, are increasingly being used by news crews for untethered news coverage, it said. The packs each accommodate up to seven different cellphone SIM cards, to access various 3G cellphone services at the same time, and they share H.264-compressed video among them, it said. If one cellular link drops out or slows, more data is loaded on the others, it said. If all are congested, the backpack reverts to more powerful compression to get the signal out, it said. When no combination of links can support a live stream, the backpack stores the stream and forwards it later, it said. LiveU packs have been used recently for news coverage of the London Olympics and the royal wedding, it said. To cover the Arab Spring uprisings in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, camera operators had limited bandwidth, it said. Still, with data rates available to cover the uprising down to 800 kbps, live pictures got out using enhanced compression, it said. The consumer version of LiveU in the form of an iPhone and Android app is being tested in London by its U.K. distributor, Garland Partners. Garland expects those apps to become commercially available globally by Q1 2013, company representatives said at recent demonstrations at a conference of the British Kinematograph, Sound and Television Society. The apps will be free to consumers because broadcasters already pay a license fee to install LiveU equipment for receiving the incoming app streams that are used as breaking news feeds, Garland said. Since few smartphones are built to accommodate more than a single SIM card, the consumer app will bond singles from a subscriber’s 3G wireless service with those of a public Wi-Fi hotspot or MiFi dongle device, for a combination link operating at speeds around 1.5 Mbps, it said. Where 4G services are available, data rates will be around six times faster than 3G, it said.