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, CA, 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 Frusin, founder and CTO of Dejero Labs (located in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada). Frusin 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, Frusin said.
Another local station, WWAY-TV, the ABC affiliate serving North Carolinas 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, New Jersey, 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 challenging in the past.
Wher
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
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.
