How to Become an iOS-Based Broadcaster

Become Your Own IT Crew

Now it’s time to take off your production hat and put on your IT hat—even if you didn’t know you had one. Streaming requires networking, and networking requires that you understand how to move bits back and forth. There can even be cases where you are leveraging a network for a local production that you might not even be streaming.

Many of the solutions discussed here are able to leverage new technology that puts cameras on a local area network. We can credit NewTek for its NDI solutions for the majority of this, but Teradek also has its own solutions for wireless remote cameras. Panasonic has created an entire line of pan-tilt-zoom cameras that are NDI-capable and controllable from the TriCaster or any NDI client. Other streaming solutions, such as Wirecast and vMix, support NDI as well.

You can also use NDI wireless with various adapters from NewTek and others that put any camera on your local Wi-Fi network. Teradek has similar solutions with dedicated hardware. Having a camera that is not tethered by a cable back to your control room is a very handy tool indeed. But getting your signal in the air is just the start of a long and complex process.

When you go on location, you can turn on your phone and see dozens upon dozens of Wi-Fi signals all crammed into a limited amount of bandwidth. If you’re leveraging wireless connectivity for any of your solutions, you really need to do a site survey before your actual streaming event to assess what the clearest channels might be and what changes you can make to your Wi-Fi set up to ensure maximum reliability.

I use an Android app called WiFi Analyzer (Figure 7, below) to let me see how many access points (APs) are already on what channels, and where I can program my APs for the least competition. I have not found a similar iOS app to recommend.

Figure 7. Identifying available access points in WiFi Analyzer

Teradek offers products, like the Link, for more robust Wi-Fi, and there are people leveraging business-class directional antenna systems to help them ensure their temporary coverage of outdoor events and stadiums. Do not ever count on using the Wi-Fi at the location to handle your video signals. You will be fighting with all the other traffic. You may even get flagged or automatically throttled.

For simpler productions, numerous users in several forums are lauding the new Google Wi-Fi “pucks” and their automatic mesh networking capability to handle multiple cameras without issue. Zero setup and management issues enable you to focus on the production and not have to
wear that IT hat for very long.

I, myself, bought a very-high-end, tri-band access point/router touting the latest Multiple User Multiple In and Multiple Out (MU-MIMO). It’s supposed to talk to multiple devices at full bandwidth as if each were the only one on the access point. Only after not getting great results, and then doing a lot of research, did I find that MU-MIMO is for output from the access point only. It doesn’t help ingest multiple wireless cameras at all.

The alternative is to have multiple access points that only a couple of phones are sending video to. This way, phones A and B connect to AP-1, while phones C and D connect to AP-2, etc. This means that your access point doesn’t have to be amazing at all. But external antennas do help. In certain situations, directional antennas specifically pointing at distant cameras can be the difference between success and failure.

Bye-Bye, Wi-Fi

Lastly, you may find yourself streaming from a spot where wireless simply is not a workable solution, such as an exhibit floor where there are hundreds of devices all trying to use wireless connectivity. You need reliability for your video stream, so you need to put all your devices on a wire. For the iPhone solutions I mentioned before, Apple makes an Ethernet adapter that enables you to connect each phone to a hub with an Ethernet cable, which puts your entire production on the reliability of a dedicated, purpose-built, wired network made solely for your video traffic.

Short of that, my standard practice is to at least put my iPad on the LAN with an ethernet adapter. This means that if I have four cameras, the Wi-Fi access point has to receive only four cameras. That’s it. If you put the iPad on Wi-Fi, then the access point has to receive four camerasand send those four streams back out to the iPad, doubling the bandwidth. Then the iPad has to send the stream back to the AP to go out to the internet. If you’re using AirPlay for a video feed, then you are essentially sending up to 10 streams of data through one access point instead of just four.

Getting your video mixer on a wire into the LAN takes away a lot of wireless traffic and helps ensure the clearest path for your camera feeds. And, usually, you can position your iPad on a table with the LAN, the audio mixer, and related hardware, resulting in sort of a mobile “control room” that you build on-site.

Bond. Must Bond.

If you’re going to be broadcasting from a fixed location, you can generally work with the IT manager of the facility to get a dedicated cable with a dedicated amount of bandwidth (QoS) carved out for your upload stream. Generally, 5 to 10Mbps upload for each stream that you’re going to push would be the starting point. I have worked on broadcasts that have required two streams, where the second stream was coming from a second laptop and basically being a redundant “fallback” that the streaming server could pick up if the main stream died. This could potentially happen if the laptop running the video mixing/streaming app crashes.

However, all of that does not help you if there is an interruption in the connectivity after your device. This is where bonding comes into play. Bonding splits up your stream and uses multiple pathways to the internet at the same time. Should one fail, the bonding solution would automatically switch over to the other connections and your stream would not be affected.

Bonding solutions like LiveU Solo are very handy in that they can utilize the local Ethernet connection and a Wi-Fi connection, and you can plug in USB LTE sticks. If you’re in the field, solutions like the LiveU Solo or the Teradek Bond (Figure 8, below) or ShareLink can enable you to leverage multiple connections to deliver redundancy in delivering your stream to the internet.

Figure 8. Teradek Bond

Even within a single iPad or iPhone, there are solutions. Speedify (Figure 9, below) is one app/service available that puts bonding (and a VPN) inside your iOS device. So if you have an iPad with a SIM card, you can have internal LTE, plus an external LTE hotspot on a second carrier sharing Wi-Fi, and even a third source coming in through an Ethernet adapter. The bonding solution can choose one primary and then fail over to the others. They can spread the data across all the sources, usually increasing available upload bandwidth in the process.

Figure 9. Speedify puts bonding inside your iOS device.

2 ≠ 2

Having multiple data connections does not automatically mean that you have a bonded solution. If you have a phone with LTE and also have access to Wi-Fi, that does not mean you are using all of the different paths available to you at the same time. iOS is designed to only connect to one internet source at a time.

Bonding solutions are purpose-built and must communicate with a service at the other end to put all the pieces back together. If I use the Speedify on my phone, some packets go over cellular and some packets go over Wi-Fi through the local area network. These packets are reassembled in the proper order at the other end by Speedify. The same goes for any other bonding solutions like LiveU or Teradek.