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Are you streaming live or near-live video from the field yet? What are you using to do it?
We were just discussing our post-tornado coverage and were trying to imagine what we can do to get the shots to air sooner, rather than driving the tape home first. This stuff is evolving every other month, so, though I have asked the question before, there may be newer, better answers today than even just last month. The Europeans seem to have jumped on this streaming over 3G and 4g wireless phone networks thing much more rapidly than we here in the Midwest US. They have actual products in use and for sale. Over here, it seems like a mystery nobody’s heard of.
So… ARE you using one of these systems yet? The kind that divide the high def signal across 4 or more wireless modem cards to carry the bandwidth of full HD video and send it back over the net to a base station at your home office?
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2 Replies
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Hi Mark,
We use a Teradeck Bond unit which works very well. There are 3 hardware components, and 1 software setup, but overall its pretty easy to get going. They make composite, HDMI, and HD-SDI units. On the camera, you will have 2 pieces, a video encoder which takes your HD-SDI video input and converts it to a MPEG-2 (H.264) video stream. On top of that is a data card Bond unit which takes up to five 3G/4G cards and puts them all together for a really fast stream. Together, these units weigh about a pound and they mount right on the hotshoe mount on the camera. That will stream your video footage back to your base news station, or wherever you point it to.
Then at your base station, you need a Linux server setup with their software to receive the stream. Once it is received, you hook up a decoder box that plugs into the server, and that decodes the stream back and has an HD-SDI output which you can feed into your video mixxer.
They also have HDMI or analog SD models if you so choose.
Overall these units work great. The latency is 1-5 seconds from live until its in the news room. The downfall in your application would be if the cell towers are taken out by the tornado, or if you are out of 3G/4G range. The units do have adaptive streaming, so it will send the best quality video based on your available bandwidth.
Turn-key, its about a $7,000 solution.
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What brand bonder are you using?
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