LiveU unveils plans to equip all motor racing cars with mobile TX units
Formula 1 and NASCAR targeted in bold standardisation drive
As Griiip’s start-up motorsport series G1 prepares to race its first full season, LiveU has revealed ambitious plans to outfit not just G1 series vehicles with its video transmission units but the race cars of every motorsport.
“We’d like to have every G1 series car manufactured by Griiip to have a LiveU installed at the factory,” reveals Ronen Artman., vice president of marketing at LiveU.
“So, it won’t matter whether you compete in a G1 series or whether you buy that car to compete elsewhere, there will be a LiveU unit installed. Customers can then reach out to us and request to operate that unit. We can set them up with access to our cloud service so that drivers stream live online.”
“As we move forward, we hope that every race car in every motorsport from F3, F2 and Formula One and NASCAR will come pre-installed with a LiveU.”
This could open up a new market in user-generated live streaming motorsport action.
But beyond even that, LiveU has the ambition to pre-install a LiveU on board every motor-racing car, period.
“As we move forward, we hope that every race car in every motorsport from F3, F2 and Formula One and NASCAR will come pre-installed with a LiveU. We envision this will become a standard for every car.
“We’re doing tests with 5G and we think that with the progression of cellular infrastructure and the particular way we handle high-speed transmission we think this will offer a solution for delivery of a high-quality reliable motorsport experience all over the world.”
Great pairing
LiveU units are currently paired with GoPros on each of the ten cars set to compete in this year’s G1 Series starting in Italy in April. The Isreal-based car manufacturer Griiip approached LiveU just two years ago.
“They reached out to us via our website not knowing that we were based in Tel Aviv,” explains Artman. “They approached us with the vision the G1 is all about innovation and wanted to transmit races live without any hardware.
“We came up with the idea to install a LU200 video field unit in each car competing in the Italian series with and to transmit video over cellular internet.”
This happened during the pilot debut season of the G1 Series last year and included a remote production of the race, switching of feeds from each car overlaid with graphics and stats, streamed live to the Griiip website and to Facebook.
“That was the first step. For this season we’ve moved to the next stage and developed with them a Stream Selector. This is the capability to allow the viewer to download an app and view feeds from all race cars on the circuit as well as a main director’s cut of the race. The viewer will have the option to select the view they want.”
This Stream Select interface was the second step and after some beta testing, LiveU are hopeful of launching this in time for the start of the new G1 series in April.
Same delay
Each LU200 unit is set to the same delay with contribution links encoded in H.264 and sent over cellular internet to the remote production hub which has taken place trackside in Italy, at Griiip’s base which is also in Italy and in Israel.
A delay of 5 seconds is incorporated as a buffer to capture and sync streams from all cars which can travel at speeds up to 250 mph. Glass to glass – to Facebook Live, for example – the delay is around 10 seconds.
“We did a lot of tests around tracks in Italy to make sure we could do this. Two modems weren’t quite working but with four modems in every unit it was amazing.”
LiveU is in process of upgrading all G1 cars with its LU300 transmitter which uses the more efficient HEVC compression.
“It is quite amazing to see how the encoder is providing very steady and reliable feeds even at those high speeds and even around crowded circuits in Italy.”
“We’re doing tests with 5G and we think that with the progression of cellular infrastructure and the particular way we handle high-speed transmission we think this will offer a solution for delivery of a high-quality reliable motorsport experience all over the world.”
Besides the LiveU units on each of the ten race cars, two of the larger and full-featured LU600 portable transmission packs are in operation. These can deliver up to 20Mbps, file transfer speeds of 60Mbps and a 100Mbps high-speed internet connection compressed using H.265 HEVC. These are used to transmit aerial pictures from a drone and of pre-and post-race interviews and pit lane action from a roaming camera-operator.
AWS is used for cloud hosting so there’s no need for a hardware server and streams can be switched by a NewTek Tricaster, Blackmagic Design ATEM or any other live switcher.
“There are plans to increase the G1 race cars competing in next season’s series to 15 or 16. Adding more LiveU units is very easy. Because each has a battery life of two hours you just need to charge them ahead of time power for the whole race.”
Along the route
While LiveU tech is currently used in other motorsports it is mostly on the periphery. These include the Silk Way off-road rally in Russia last year where LU600 HEVC units were used for the start and finish points, along the route a team truck and overhead on a helicopter.
With rights holder and promoter WRC, the tech was pushed further in coverage of last October’s FIA World Rally Championship’s from Germany. LU600’s transmitted live footage from different stages of the rally, interviews in the service park, and file transfer from the field all controlled and monitored remotely by WRC TV.
Until now, motorsport events like WRC have mainly relied on satellite and RF to cover events where stages spread up to 250km. The WRC use motorbikes to deliver material from the field to the studio.
LiveU isn’t alone in being used increasingly by rallying, cycling and marathon-style sports for live or store-and-forward coverage. Rival Dejero has scored some success here too.
The key requirements are mobility along with signal robustness both of which are improving all the time and providing producers with access to footage they’ve not had previously and at considerably reduced workflow cost.
Further reading:
Griiip strikes first broadcast deal for disruptive race car series