Innovations at TVU Networks support move to cloud-based workflows

TVU Networks has opened up about its major initiatives in 2020 that helped customers navigate through social distancing restrictions while assisting with business continuity.

The company began the year by winning a Technical & Engineering Emmy Award for its video over bonded cellular internet protocol (VoCIP) technology and went on to introduce number of new and upgraded solutions, including TVU Partyline, TVU Producer 3.0 and TVU One, a cellular mobile transmitter that shipped with embedded 5G modems, one of the first in the US.

“COVID-19 forced broadcasters to migrate from a traditional, studio-based production infrastructure to outside-the-box thinking for newscasts and other programming,” explained Paul Shen, chief executive officer at TVU Networks. “Throughout the year, solutions like our TVU Anywhere app for remote production and TVU Grid for content distribution saw a significant increase in use, while our new TVU Partyline collaboration tool helped broadcasters overcome the limitations of typical video conferencing solutions.”

With broadcasters scrambling to create new workflows because of COVID-19, TVU experienced a 500% increase in the total number of hours of TVU Anywhere use since the beginning of the pandemic. The company also reported 1.3 million hours of mobile transmitter use, as well as 3.4 million hours of content distributed through the TVU Grid point-to-multipoint infrastructure.

Shen added: “As we celebrate our company’s 16th anniversary, we are positioned to deliver more cloud-based solutions to even more vertical markets across the globe in 2021. Internally, we adopted the DevOps process and Jira for project management, allowing us to quickly develop, test and implement customer requests practically overnight.”

As COVID-19 began to impact workflows, TVU provided extensive outreach to the broadcast community, as it needed to transition to remote production due to restrictions. When newscasts first moved from studios to living rooms, TVU’s Business Continuity Initiative provided the TVU Anywhere app and other no-cost tools to reporters and anchors forced to abruptly transition to at-home production.

TVU also launched the Project Pool Feed initiative, which let government agencies share critical daily updates regarding efforts to combat the virus with local broadcasters and other media outlets while allowing reporters to respect social distancing requirements. Powered by TVU Grid, government officials shared live video pool feeds and also had use of the TVU Anywhere app on their mobile phones.

In May, the company announced TVU Partyline, a collaborative solution for TVU Producer. TVU Partyline’s real-time interactive layer (RTIL) delivers real-time interaction between talent, crew and external content contributors.

With full HD video (1080p60) and synchronised audio in a familiar video conferencing interface, TVU Partyline helps broadcasters explore new ways to pool resources from various locations. For example, producers can co-ordinate production efforts with citizen journalists, while limiting their access to the production discussion.

Also in May, TVU launched TVU Producer 3.0. In response to customer feedback, the updated multi-camera cloud production solution includes an audio mixing panel, which uses a browser-based interface to provide full control of all audio signals from any location via touchscreen. Its time synchronisation technology ensures the TVU Producer audio mixer panel has zero latency execution of production commands, plus synchronisation between audio and video signals.

TVU also unveiled TVU One with HEVC and embedded 5G modules for full 5G infrastructure support in May. The sixth generation of the company’s mobile IP video transmitter uses the patented TVU Inverse StatMux Plus (IS+) for reliable transmission of 1080p HDR and 4K HLG/HDR.

With demand growing for remote and cloud-based production solutions across different verticals, TVU expanded its global team with a number of industry veterans to meet the increased interest and to service a growing base of customers. New team members are focused on the sports and entertainment industry, product marketing and solutions, and sales efforts in a number of regions.