An attentive crowd at the KFMB studios heard Sumnit Singh make a case for using the technology developed for consumer mobile devices to relay news audio and video to broadcast outlets over private networks. It should be interesting to see if stations step up to the plate to capitalize this evolution, or if an organization will step up to finance the movement and then resell to broadcasters, or if the technology will die on the vine before being rolled out.
Many thanks to Sumit Singh for traveling to San Diego and for buying our lunch.
TV stations are in a frustrating position these days with respect to electronic news gathering. The science of bonded cellular LTE has matured to the point of being quite practical for carrying HD news video over much of our metro areas. However, operating costs are high and you can’t depend on it at locations that are either crowded so that the cell site bandwidth is used up or in rural areas with sketchy cell coverage. On the other hand, microwave ENG requires expensive site leases, expensive maintenance, and vehicles with tall masts and skilled operators. Ka-band satellite ENG has significant upfront and operating costs. So what’s happened in many TV stations is a slow build-up of OpEx and CapEx that are trying the patience of your bean counters.
What if you could replace your maintenance- and operations-intensive rotating parabolic antennas with sector antennas and a simple transceiver? Says Moseley:
EVENT LTE™ is a bidirectional, point-to-multipoint microwave system that employs state-of-the-art LTE OFDMA wireless technology with advanced MIMO in both uplink and downlink, tailored specifically for ENG service to provide two or more times the bandwidth capacity of conventional single-stream systems. The channel- and traffic-aware dynamic bandwidth allocation, quality of service and security features enable EVENT LTE™ system to offer highly reliable and secure ENG service, support multiple applications with varying requirements, and facilitate the dynamic addition of new trucks in the field. EVENT LTE™ base station supports multiple collocated or non-overlapping sectors. The robust design and scalable architecture allows for uninterrupted service even in demanding non-line-of-sight deployments and facilitates organic growth of the ENG infrastructure enabling significant capital and operations savings.