HACKENSACK, N.J.—Underscoring how far field newsgathering has come, LiveU said more than 4,000 of its encoders, the largest-ever fleet deployed for a single event, were used to cover the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
That was nearly double the number of LiveU encoders deployed for Election Day coverage in 2020. Other use statistics painted a similar picture. For instance, 925 customers from 56 countries used the LiveU ecosystem to transmit more than 40 terabytes of data during the 48-hour period considered to be Election Day, representing almost 40,000 hours of live content, the company said.
"This election created an unprecedented amount of action, excitement and interest worldwide, with LiveU's EcoSystem at the heart of the coverage,” LiveU Senior Vice President of Sales Brian Tully said.
“A vast amount of video traffic flowed through every stage—from the on-location encoders to the production control rooms,” he said. “It was truly incredible to see all the election content created, produced and shared using our technology. Our teams were operating at full speed, ensuring the highest levels of reliability, video performance and customer support across the country, including Howard University, West Palm Beach and the battleground states.”
LiveU's flagship LU800 units were used nationwide in diverse scenarios—within both remote (REMI) and on-site production workflows—transmitting live feeds to control rooms across the U.S., Latin America, the U.K., Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Africa. News crews used their LiveU packs around the country to cover every key moment, from supporters’ reactions to the victory and concession speeches, the company said.
LiveU Matrix, the company’s cloud-native IP-video distribution solution, played a key role with the distribution of 23,000 hours of live feeds and 7,500 feeds shared, almost double the content distributed during the 2020 election. The LiveU Matrix platform enabled broadcasters worldwide to exchange high-quality, low-latency live feeds and create collaborative news pools, helping to expand content coverage from battleground states to campaign headquarters, it said.
For the first time in a major event, LiveU Ingest was instrumental in the production process, with broadcasters deploying the story-centric solution for automatic recording and story metadata tagging, integrated with their MAM systems, it said.
About 6,500 recordings of live feeds and more than 4,000 hours of content were recorded over the election day period. Cross-station content visibility enabled participating stations to access each other's content. Customers could process video faster in the field, knowing that everything was automatically recorded, it said.
LiveU's Mobile Data service was also in use, combined with LAN access at the key campaign sites and leveraging the LiveU Reliable Transport (LRT) protocol.
With a dedicated Election Day task force in place, LiveU’s 24/7 phone and email support was bolstered by engineers deployed on-site at candidate headquarters, ready to support and provide more equipment as needed, it said.
During the Republican and Democratic conventions, the company provided customers with the option of adding LiveU Private Connectivity, providing uncontested connectivity via a dedicated Private 5G connection. LiveU will also make it available on Inauguration Day.
More information is available on the company’s website.
