LiveU Deployed 190 Units to Broadcasters at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics

Company is seeing a shift to using its packs not only for ENG use, but for primary transmission of events

The Olympic Games bring together broadcasters large and small from all around the world to cover a sprawling collection of events than span across numerous venues. Many of those broadcasters are in need of a simple and portable way to get their content back home and, for many, that means utilizing the services of a transmission partner like LiveU.

A whopping 190 LiveU units were deployed last month by various broadcast entities across PyeongChang with those units churned out 7,100 live  sessions broadcast out to approximately 40 different countries. That totaled up to about 6 terabytes of live transmissions.

These PyeongChang Games also marked the first time that LiveU offered a 4K-ready solution that relied primarily on HEVC (high-efficiency video coding) for compression.

In the eyes of Ronen Artman, LiveU’s VP of Marketing, the latest iterations of the company’s technology have had its clients using the solution in a much more liberal way. LiveU built its early legacy on being a strong solution for ENG news crews in the field. Lately, LiveU technology is being used more and more as a source for primary transmission.

“We’ve seen a shift occur over the previous two Olympic Games and the last World Cup,” says Artman. “Prior to that, most of the broadcasters were using our unit in this environment to transmit the content back to a main MCR for later use. Now many of them are simply going live with the [LiveU] unit. It’s truly a testament to the technology and that it works.”

The move to HEVC and the availability of a 4K product also have LiveU clients finding themselves more confident in using the transmission tech in more frequent live sports scenarios.

“We think that our HEVC/4K solution is fit for professional sports, and not talking about just the behind-the-scenes news hits. We see a trend moving toward the units are being used to broadcast the main event itself. This is exactly the position we want and with our encoding level, quality level, and the bandwidth level, we are capable of replacing satellite and fiber when applicable.”

For its numerous clients in PyeongChang, LiveU also had a logistics center on site as a hub for gear rental and repair. The company also had experts in the technology there to provide any advice and support.