Traditional broadcasters would send out a “news-car” or OB Truck complete with a satellite dish for live streaming news as it unfolds. But this is both expensive and not particularly adaptable. Many news journalists are now using their smart phones to provide live feed news over the standard 3G/4G network as oppose to satellite news gathering. Though the quality may not be as good, it is still considered good enough in 720p formats and the ease of capturing news has never been more simple.
Digital satellite news gathering solutions have been around for years and quality of service can be guaranteed – but it comes at a price. Enter stage left the Soliton Smart Telecaster range of mobile news gathering solutions.
The Zao is an H.265 HEVC encoder that can be used for digital mobile news gathering solutions. It takes the output from a camera and compresses the video stream and then will live stream via the public 3G or 4G LTE network back to a broadcast station. All with very small amount of latency –interviews with the studio presenter do not suffer from the delay that can sometimes cause embarrassment for the people back in the studio when people can talk over the top of each other. Video contribution in this way with traditional cameras is a compelling cost effective solution for digital mobile news gathering and a great alternative to Satellite News gathering.
Another method for live news as already mentioned is to use a smart phone, iPhone or Android, to stream live video. Putting picture quality aside for now, the issue is at the receiving end to convert this live video stream into a format that can be used by the ingest platform of the broadcaster. Typically they would need an HD-SDI input into their broadcast workflow, or an RTMP/RTSP for IP streaming to a cloud based distribution service or to a social media platform such as YouTube. By using ML Cam from Soliton, it is easy to live stream from an iPhone and this can stream to HD-View, which is a decoding platform that can convert to HD-SDi or RTMP at the MCR of the broadcast centre. The latency is also very small.
This is a great alternative for digital satellite news gathering solutions. It is cost effective, easy to use and extremely flexible. By having a strategy of utilising Zao’s or ML-Cams, they can both write to the same HD-View decoder giving the best of both worlds of both camera based acquisition or smart-phone streaming for live news gathering in a single solution.