HACKENSACK, N.J.—LiveU has announced that fans of the motorsport U.K. speedway are now benefiting from ExStream Media’s decision to drastically improve the quality and reliability of its streaming output by deploying LiveU’s LU300S field units.
Based in Middlesbrough, UK, ExStream Media’s co-owners Martin Hunter and Ben Duffill, began exploring the possibilities of live streaming speedway races from around the UK.
British Speedway’s top league (of three) already had from very good coverage by Eurosport and Discovery+. While the broadcaster also has the rights for the lower tier leagues, Hunter explained that they wanted to provide more coverage of the leagues to satisfy fans.
After the broadcaster approved the idea of them working working with the clubs to expand live streaming, ExStream then developed a technical setup using multiple cameras on-site fed into a vision mixer and then streamed live via a CDN.
“We knew that there would be connectivity issues but given the risk we were taking, we wanted to keep equipment costs to a minimum,” he said. “Although we were using another IP solution, it was low grade and we had many occasions where image quality dropped to an unacceptable level, especially given that we are a subscription service. Then one evening while trying to cover an event our whole system collapsed, failing completely.”
To fix the problem, Hunter reached out to LiveU and LiveU responded quickly, with ExStream having a unit in its hands three days after contact and in time for the coming weekend’s event.
“The LU300S works exactly as it promises to do,” Hunter said. “We needed to save our business, to be blunt, and this technology has been essential. Now, when we turn up, wherever that may be, we simply turn it on, set up the rest of our gear and off we go. We don’t have to worry about connectivity at all and this has completely changed our mindset. It has freed us up to concentrate on creating better content to keep our subscribers happy. The LU300S achieves for us exactly what we want.”
Weighing just over 900 g (2 pounds), the LU300S offers resilient bonding in a compact and lightweight portable unit, supporting up to 30 Mbps via up to six IP connections based on LiveU’s patented HEVC bonding technology. The mixed feed is sent by the LU300S to a LiveU cloud server, then onto a CDN.
“We come across a lot of people in similar situations to ExStream where minimizing the cost initially becomes a false economy,” explained Malcom Harland, U.K. country manager with LiveU, says, The end product has to work, and work well, otherwise subscribers churn and both revenues and reputation falter. The LU300S is ideal for these kinds of streaming operations, being powerful, compact and with a mighty punch when it comes to image quality and signal resilience. We’re very pleased that ExStream has benefited from this and that we were able to supply them so quickly.”
