Broadcasters Comfortable with Cellular ENG

MULTIPLE CITIES There was a time when you couldn't convince a local news station to use the public cellular networks to transmit live video back to the station. Basically, although the prospect of eliminating an expensive microwave truck was attractive, the technology was too unreliable due to the emergence of smart phones that tended to suck up available bandwidth. Indeed, like anyone with a cellphone could tell you, sometimes you had reception, sometimes you didn't. The inherent advantage, however, was bringing camera operators closer to a news event than the live truck was capable of.

Today, with advance in compression, on-the-fly bit rate adjustments and a better understanding of how to find available bandwidth across several carriers simultaneously (by bonding different cellular carriers' services together), the vendors of this technology, including Dejero, LiveU, and TVU Networks, are finding it a lot easier to make a sale. In fact, all four major U.S. networks at both the network and local level, as well as the hundreds of local affiliates that produce live news are using it for a variety of applications and giving viewers an on the scene experience like never before.

For example, during the recent forest fires surrounding the Colby fire in the hills above Glendora and Azusa, Calif., KCBS-KCAL camera operator J.R. Hall took his camera and a small Dejero Live+ transmitter inside a backpack and literally shot footage from inside the fire and the station broadcasted it live. Sometimes the HD feed went black and white, due to heavy smoke hindering cellular reception, but the notion of bringing viewers inside a forest fire was more than compelling.

Thank goodness sometimes [it was] in black and white and not color because it'd be a little bit scarier if it was in color to see all that fire, Hall said, in an interview with KCBS. I've worked in some dangerous and hostile environments all around the world for CBS and this was right up there, it was pretty scary.

As we move forward with research and development, Dejero has invested significant resources into improvement of reliability and quality of our equipment, said Bogdan Frusina, founder and chief technology officer of Dejero Labs located in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Frusina began shopping the technology in 2008 to a Canadian station and has never looked back. Together with KA-band uplink technologies as well as traditional technologies we are now able to provide much more reliable systems where stations can rely on our gear comfortably.

KTBS Channel 3 in Shreveport, Louisiana, has expanded its live newsgathering capabilities with Dejero LIVE+ 20/20 Transmitters. The station will soon deploy the Dejero LIVE+ Mobile App to members of the news staff, enabling them to capture and transmit live video using their Apple iPhone 5 smartphones.

He said that as wireless service carriers like AT&T and Sprint continue to improve cellular service with new 4G technologies, live video transmission reliability will benefit accordingly.

Better compression technologies will play a big role in our success in the medium term, Frusina said.

Another local station, WWAY-TV, the ABC affiliate serving North Carolina's Cape Fear region (and owned by Morris Network), likes the technology so much, that, according to Chief Engineer Billy Stratton, the station has sold one of its ENG microwave vans and were in the process of selling the other. We have gone all-in on it!

WWAY as well as several other Morris Network, Inc. stations (the group is made up of 14 locations in the Southeast), have gone with Dejero's technology.

The advantages are the obvious... lower cost than maintaining and insuring a live van... HD live shot capability without having to do major upgrades on ENG microwave TX and RX sites... manpower reduction... we are one-man-banding it, often with interns, Stratton said. The downside is we are in a hurricane zone and we dont yet know how these will perform with limited cell coverage during disasters.

Similar technology from LiveU, a company based in Israel with offices in in Hackensack, N.J., is used extensively across the U.S., for local news as well as coverage of live sporting events.

In many cases its getting more difficult to tell the difference between a cellular bonding feed and a satellite feed.

TV stations are absolutely more comfortable with cellular bonding, said Ken Zamkow, Head of Marketing for the U.S. and The Americas at LiveU. When we shipped our first LiveU units, the technology was considered either a novelty or a solution for places where a satellite truck could not access. Our first big live shot was during the Obama inaugural train ride in 2009 from a moving train with NBC.

Fast forward to 2014, when several hundred stations and broadcasters in the U.S. use LiveU on a daily basis for any type of live shot. In many cases its getting more difficult to tell the difference between a cellular bonding feed and a satellite feed.

The original concerns customers had were signal resilience, latency and overall picture quality, Zamkow said, adding that there are a number of developments that helped alleviate these concerns and made cellular bonding a major part of broadcasters' uplink mix. For one, LTE (4G) networks became available and carriers improved data coverage in general, offering excellent bandwidth in many areas.

LiveU has also developed a number of key features that significantly improved performance. This includes internal and external antenna arrays that offer stronger signals in remote and congested areas. In addition, the technology matured from an engineering standpoint: the algorithm and video encoder became much more efficient with every software and hardware update, thus offering better and more consistent quality in situations that were chall

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