AVIWEST, TVU, and LiveU have created a new classof devices we like to call 'cellular multiplexers.'

So how do they compare to each other?

By Dom Robinson

solution, and TVU Networks, Inc. doesn't quiteknow what to call its TVUPack.

This article attempts to provide an insightand fair comparison of three of these products.This is actually a much harder thing to do thanone might perceive, for reasons I'll go into in ashort while.

PracticalitiesFirst, let me give you an overview of the

common themes of these products:All of them aspire to provide ad hoc video

links in the field. They are inherently notintended for permanent 24/7 video links(although I guess they could do this if thepower is set up rightJ. They are ideally suitedfor demanding situations where a video link istemporarily needed, and yet a satellite link(with all its established stability and qualityJ isunfeasible. For the best logical example, thinkof news gathering. Let's look at the scenario:

A few months ago I wrote a review of avery neat box by AVlWEST called theIBIS DMNG (http:/ /bit.ly/rjbk6y). It is

used for aggregating several cellular datasignals and treating the aggregated connectionas a single pipe for streaming a point-to-pointvideo link.

Since writing that article, I've received anumber of requests for some sort of referencecomparing this and a few other options inthe market.

While there are a number of such products,they don't yet have a generic name. So forreference here, I am terming them "cellularmultiplexers" since at a technical level, thatseems to be a fairly good description of whatthey do, certainly from a Streaming Mediareader's perspective. That's not to say that theterm will take off; LiveU Ltd. calls its unit aPortable Uplink Solution, AVIWEST calls itsproduct a Digital Mobile News Gathering

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there you are, sitting in the headquarters ofyour news station. You have heard that there isa breaking story, and you need to get it on the6 p.m. news. But it will take you 2 hours to getto the location of the story. You can get areporter and a camera guy out there, but thereis no way a satellite truck can make it-partlybecause the incident has caused a huge trafficjam and partly because the trucks are notavailable. You can, however, get the team thereby motorbike.

So you send the reporter and the camera guy,who grabs his camera as well as the cellularmultiplexer.

They zoom off, get themselves to the site,prepare their broadcast, and hook the camera'sSill feed into the Sill connectors on the cellularmultiplexer. With one press of the button, theserver in your news room has the camera feedlive, delivered to you as an Sill feed. Thepicture is nearly as good as your normalsatellite feed's picture, although it's moreprone to breaking up since you are sharingthe cell phone mast with a variety of servicesranging from passersby on their iPhones tothe emergency services at the scene.

However, you are part of the only newsagency with such a link, so as the 6 p.m. newsgoes live, you are the only team with alivevideo feed. Everyone tunes in to your newsprogramme, ratings soar, the boss is happy,and the news is broken.

High-action coverage is another scenario thatthis kit uniquely lends itself to. Let's look atgolf coverage: the typical course is far too bigto completely cable up with cameras. Mostfootage focuses on a single hole and the playerspassing by, judging their performance on thatsingle hole. However, suppose you want tomake that critical difference to your show andfollow a particular player around the courselive. This is when a roving camera operator-one who is not tied to video, power, ortransmission .cables-comes into his or herown. A camera person with a bag of batteries, acamera, and a cellular multiplexer can shootlive every stroke of that chosen player's gameand send the signal back to the studio,providing unique coverage hitherto impossible.

The scenarios are as varied as camera shots.And now, with no limitation to being tetheredto an uplink, the location of your live-to-airshoot is limited only by the availability of cellphone networks.

The Challenqe of ComparisonThere are several products in the market; I

started writing this article to look at three ofthem and compare their features side by side.

During the course of collating the data,however, it became apparent that not only isobjective comparison quite tricky withoutremoving all the unique selling points-skewing the results in many ways-but also theenvironment in which they could be tested is amoving target: given that the performance ofthese technologies is undeniably prone tovariation in the quality and availability of thecell phone network signal, a rigid benchmarkattempting to compare like with like couldmisconstrue performance quite badly.

Indeed, "getting all the models in one placeand testing them with the same video souice "

sounds like the logical bench test. However,there is a complication. These models would, inthat scenario, all contend with each other on thelocal cellular networks. So while one mayperform fantastically and another may performpoorly, it could be down to factors such as sessionpriority allocated to the devices based on whichstarted its session milliseconds before the others.

So for the research for this article, Iraninto some technical challenges trying to equatethe testing I wanted to perform, and thevendors were rightly concerned that factorsbeyond their control could reflect badly ontheir technologies.

This is an interesting situation: for a reader inthe broadcast space who is used to technologythat is designed to provide the same quality ofservice and with 100% reliability, this "besteffort" angle that these IP-based technologiesrepresent must seem alien. However, when onelooks at the limitations of when and from where100% reliable "broadcast" technology must beoperated, one understands that in today'sstreaming-enabled world, quality is not alwaysfirst priority. The maxim "any signal is betterthan no signal" comes into play.

That said, for a technical benchmark, it hasproven to be a bit of a headache. Trying toquantise a moving landscape is tough.

Ultimately, I decided to do the comparisonusing given vital statistics from each vendorand comparing only statistics that all threevendors had in common. By removing featuresfrom the comparison that only one or two of thedevices had, I felt that I at least created a levelplaying field.

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Let us first take a quick profile of each ofthe products with text directly from theirown websites.

an HD Satellite truck into a compact backpack.The LU60 adds new features such as lO80i HDvideo resolution and super performance evenat ultra-low sub-second latency.

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The Technoloqies

TVU NETWORKS TVUPACK

www: TVUNE TW O RKS .GO M/PR O D U CTStI'VUP A GK

Li~UsLU60

Using TVU's Inverse StatMux technology, theTVUPack delivers broadcast quality signals byleveraging multiple 3G/WiFi connections. Itsflexible external modem connections allow itto advance to 4G/WiMAX without replacingany hardware.

.It's your Electronic News Gathering Van ina backpack

.Bring the news back to your newsroom fast

.Simple to operate, on/off button only

.Broadcast-focused, SDI, HDMI, Compositeinput and Firewire input

.Live HD-quality with multiple 2.5G/3G/4Gconnections

.Short delays. Supports real time interviewswithout pixelation

AVIWEST mIS DMNG

WWW.A VIWE S T. GO M/PRO DUG TS/D I G ITAL. NEWS-

GATHERING/IBIS. DMNG .HTML

IBIS DMNG is a patented revolutionary light,portable and cost effective DMNG (Digital MobileNews Gathering) wireless camera syst~mdesigned by A VIWEST for the broadcasters. thecontent producers and the TV stations allowingthem to produce professional live videocontents from remote places the more easy andflexible way.

The concept of this new system is based on theuse ofsimple and cost effective multiple bonded3G or 4G networks or a Wi-Fi connection thatreplace the complex. heavy and costly satellitecontribution based DSNG infrastructures.

LIVEU LU60WWWLIVEU .TV/LU60_SERIES.HTML

LU60 for Professional News Gathering overMultiple Wireless Networks

LiveU's new LU60 series takes the broadcast-from-anywhere experience to new heights withan abundantly rich feature set for Mobile ENGover multiple wireless networks. The LU60bonds up to 14 cellular (3G/4G), WiMAX and Wi-Fi modems to provide a resilient, broadcast-quality video uplink, packing the capabilities of

7he AVlWEST IBIS DMNG

40 STREAMING MEDIA EUROPEAN EDITION Autumn 2011

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42 STREAMING MEDIA EUROPEAN EDITION Autumn 2011

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Being based in the U .K. .my contact with thesecompanies has been through their local U.K.distributors:

.TVU Networks-Michael Byrne(Michael @wtsbroad cas t. com)

.LiveU-Malcolm Harland(malcolm@gpl-uk.co.uk)

.A VIWEST -Charlie Day( cday@theukoffice .com)

A huge thanks goes to them for both helpingout and also for braving this shootout.

The ResultsOne of the key things to understand upfront is

each company's pricing model.TVUPack and D11NG are sold in much the

same way-you buy the initial mobile unit and aserver unit. The mobile unit goes out in the field,and the server unit is installed at your mastercontrol room {MCR}-wherever you want thefeed brought back to for onward processing. Yousupply the data connections and arrange thecontracts as you need them.

LiveU does things differently in several ways.First, on the server side, you are suppliedsoftware and some engineering time, but youprovide the server hardware to run it. Also, youbuy the mobile unit on a service model, so youpay a monthly fee for the device that includesthe cellular contracts. It therefore provides you acertain amount of guaranteed delivery eachmonth-and this is sold in blocks of hours-forexample, 10 hours per month.

mtimately, this makes it a little difficult todo a like-for-like comparison on price. But bylooking at this as a 1-year cost for the cheapest"on the road" SD-SDI to SD-SDI configuration,it looks something like the following:

giving a fair position to each of them. Thereare. accordingly. no "outright winners" of thisshootout. Each wins in several categories. andhopefully. this will let you. the reaqer. evaluatewhich product has strong characteristics ofimportance to your own applications.

However. to give the article some focus. I haveadded a scoring of I to 3. where I is awarded tothe outright leader in a category. I then awarded2 and 3 according to the next best placements.However. in many categories. two vendors.showings were equal. so I would award them boththe same point. and the third vendor would comein the next place. By doing this the vendor withthe lower score "objectively" has the best offering.

That said, I feel that there should be anassociated column filled in by the reader,essentially. a multiplier that reflects howimportant each of these categories is to theparticular application.

So. for example. if portability is key. thenI would have a multiplier on the dimensionsrow of I; if it is not important. I would havea multiplier of. say. 3. and I would apply thismultiplier to each ofmy scores. Doing this wouldgive a truer indicator of the right solution for aparticular application.

The ~al comment I have before taking youinto spreadsheet land is that all these productsare excellent: they are all going to playasignificant part in the mobilisation of media andthe proliferation of sources for. in particular.live content.

It is also important to highlight that themethodology I have tried to employ here ignoresall unique selling points. I wanted to onlycompare features that were common to allplatforms. This is a critical point. and I stronglyrecommend you to explore each in detail withthe vendors; you may find that a USP that I haveexcluded from this article is actually a killer appfor your purposes.

Whichever of these products you do finallycommit to, you will find it to be robust, flexible,and reliable.

And despite the fact that you can. at a push,sleep in a satellite truck. these devices are a hellof a lot more versatile for all other purposes!

I spoke to the vendors and we agreed thatI would collate a range of data and pick asubset of these characteristics that ended up

Dom Robinson (d2@d2consulting.co.uk) is an independentconsultant trading as D2Consulting and a contributing editor toStreaming Media.Comments? Email us at letters@streamingmedia.com. or checkthe masthead for other ways to contact us.

44 STREAMING MEDIA EUROPEAN EDITION Autumn 2011