LiveU Goes All-In on 5G With New LU800 Field Production Unit

LiveU Goes All-In on 5G With New LU800 Field Production Unit Solution was built with 5G and sports-content producers at its core By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - 1:38 pm

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On Tuesday, LiveU unveiled its latest field unit, the LU800. The all-in-one production solution is the company's first multi-input portable encoder with 5G support.

According to LiveU, the LU800 delivers four frame-synced HD feeds through IP bonding (up to 14 connections). It is capable of delivering up to 4Kp60 10-bit HDR transmission and up to 16 audio channels.

LiveU's new LU800 production solution can deliver 4Kp60 10-bit HDR transmission and 16 audio channels.

Although LiveU has become a popular vendor among sports-content creators, the company made its mark in news. According to Janel Fleming, director, sales/manager, sports, Sales Group, LiveU, this is the company's first solution designed from the ground up from the feedback of live-sports producers.

This is our first product, I think, that was truly designed and built around a sports solution, she explains. We are building, in our future roadmap, more software and solutions that support what our sports customers have come to request of us.

The unit is built around 5G specifically, with eight 5G internal, dual-SIM modems and high-efficiency internal antennas.

Fleming points out that, although 5G is not yet available in most places, this solution sets its clients up to be prepared for that day. The company has been running rigorous testing of its solutions with sports customers looking to prepare for a 5G world in venues.

5G networks require a different modem than the traditional LTE and 4G networks that we know, she says. It requires more power, a certain antenna range that brings the true value of a 5G network. We could have retrofitted the modem in our existing packs, but we would have been sacrificing a lot of things: latency, power drivers, the CPU in the unit. We decided that, rather than doing that, we would build it from the ground up and build everything around the 5G modems.

Rounding out the end-to-end capabilities of the unit is the fact that multi-camera production streams are fully managed by the LiveU Central cloud-based management platform and fed into the LiveU Matrix IP content-management and -distribution workflow.

Launching this groundbreaking product has taken on extra relevance, with the industry experiencing social distancing and budget limitations, LiveU CEO Samuel Wasserman said in an official announcement of the product. There is an acute and growing need for high-quality, reliable, and cost-effective solutions supporting [at-home/REMI] workflows. The LU800 offers unlimited possibilities for customers to enrich their productions and cover more events at a fraction of the cost of traditional transmission methods.

The LU800 is available now. Price was not made available at press time.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2020/06/02/liveu-goes-all-in-on-5g-with-ne...
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