Ben Ratner Emmy Award-Winning Director/Producer, specializing at the intersection of content, technology and distribution.
2026-01-25
Here in Boston, we're about to receive our largest snowfall in four years. I used to work in local and national news - and I've learned firsthand how important weather coverage is to viewers. A lot has changed about production workflows in the last six years - and we have many new tools at LiveU to help keep your news team safe and productive. Some of our tools enable more of your team to work from home, and others provide smart ways for your crews and reporters to contribute content from home and the field.
Cloud Control Room.
With LiveU Studio, you can spin up a fully-featured control room in the cloud in just seconds. Add your own branding,lower thirds, bring in live feeds from anywhere (including directly from a LiveU backpack), and stream out to dozens of destinations. All you need is a web browser - the rest of your production fully happens in the cloud. This is also a great disaster recovery tool if you get snowed out of your studio!
This is a great tool for weather alerts, cut-ins, and alternative content during a big storm. It only takes one person to operate it. Our remote guest feature allows you to send a link to anyone with a webcam (including a cell phone) and they can be on the air in seconds. You can also bring in feeds from LiveU Matrix and LiveU Nexus, so if you have access to feeds of government officials giving press conference and other live video, you don't need to send out an extra camera operator and reporter. Cloud production has a few major benefits over on-prem production during extreme weather. If your computer shuts down, someone has to troubleshoot or restart it in person. You're limited to the number of streams you can produce. With LiveU Studio, you can have unlimited control rooms - a stream for your weather radar and traffic cameras, a stream for live weather analysis from your meteorologists, and a stream of your governor giving a press conference - no additional hardware needed! LiveU Studio allows more of your team, including some members of your digital and control teams, to stay safe at home while getting the news out.
Scan Converter in the Cloud
With LiveU Nexus, you can bring in any kind of video feed from anywhere on the internet. This includes a cloud-based scan converter, so you can bring in just about any content you can think of - including video that viewers post on social media, weather maps from NOAA, and live streams from publicly-available video feeds. It can also bring in SRT, RTMP and HLS feeds, so if you have remote cameras that stream over those protocols, it's easy to bring them right into your physical control room, or through LiveU Studio. None of this requires anyone to be on-prem in your control room, so your producers, digital and desk teams can stay safe at home. No one has to go to a physical computer, load up a website, and move their mouse off-screen to make sure it doesn't show up on air!
Automatic Recording
With LiveU Ingest, you can automatically record all of your LiveU feeds (and just about anything else) - and apply story metadata to them! This means your ingest/receive operator doesn't have to take calls about recording and naming feeds -they can focus on quality control and other responsibilities. This is particularly useful during hours where you may not be fully staffed, or if it's unsafe for them to drive to the studio. With our Story Based Workflow, you can tie the metadata from your rundown directly to the ingested footage, so it's easy to find and work with your video. Using LiveU Ingest, we create live growing files in your Media Asset Management system. This means all footage is available to work with in real time, in just seconds. This allows editors, digital/social producers, and others to do their production from home, while having access to all the footage they need. It also lets your ingest/receive operator monitor feeds remotely, with no need to physically be in your studio. As an added bonus, you can get automatic live transcription with services like Trint, so you can spend less time finding the soundbites you need for air.
Automation and Orchestration
Your ingest/receive person is usually responsible for making sure your LiveU feeds are going to the correct server channel in the control room. This is traditionally a manual process. Now, with LiveU Schedule, you can schedule your camera operators, reporters, LiveU encoders, and LiveU channels automatically, so you don't need to focus on them in real time!
This means that you can have less people focusing on these kinds of tasks, and more people focusing on getting your stories out. Of course, this can all be done remotely from home. We can even get more advanced with this - we can connect to just about anything with an API. This means that we can control things like your IRD receivers, video ecorders, and other types of software and hardware.
Using & Sharing Live Video
LiveU Matrix continues to be one of the most valuable tools in live production. Quickly grab pool and shared feeds from your providers and partners, and put them on the air in seconds. As I mentioned earlier, this can help you get content like government officials giving press conferences without having to send someone there in person. You can better prioritize your news crews to get more stories that matter to your viewers - or let more of them stay safe at home. Contribution Severe weather can get crazy - fast. You may not have time to get your reporters or photographers to a safe location for their stories. Using the LiveU Smart app, your reporters can join your broadcasts right from their phone wherever they are, with useful features like video return and IFB. These feeds can go directly into your control room, or even right into LiveU Studio. This is also a great way to get more live shots of the weather without sending your photographers on the road. Anyone on your team - including your viewers - can download the app in
seconds and send you a live feed from anywhere. Using our LRT protocol, you can actually bond together your WiFi and cellular connections, so you can have more reliable bandwidth than a single connection.
Connectivity
LiveU IQ (LIQ) Is a brand new process that allows you to dynamically change which cell providers are being used by the e-sims in real-time. This is an automatic process that is invisible to the user. We are seeing significantly stronger bandwidth compared to traditional encoders. Snow storms and extreme weather may take out some cellular providers - and LiveU IQ makes sure you don't waste a single megabit of connectivity by switching you to the best available providers.