Tooway for internet video streaming

Hi guys,

I run an online TV broadcasting company called Roller Derby UK TV (rduk.tv).

As we broadcast from sporting venues very few of them have internet access or suitable speeds for broadcast. (Upload is everything to us not download. Most ADSL lines have an upload from 256kbps-1.3mbps tops).

We are testing different transportation types to aim us in broadcasting at a cost that is affordable to people. At the moment we use a high gain 3G router which is fairly sucessfull at providing 800-900kbps that we require yet this can be very unpredictable. i.e. it may have a great signal but the is awful.

I looked at Tooway and through the speeds look good enough for us to use (upto 4Mbps in some cases). I was aware satellite has a latency and luckily our protocal isnt affected by this.

While researching I found a website of someone who used tooway to broadcast to the BBC in a war zone. This was very successful and someone in the comments had also tested Tooway for braodcasting with success. Therefore, based on this and a couple of research emails, we have ordered a tooway system to test.

We have gone for the tooway 8 package as this is a reasonable price offering adequate uplink speed and data cap.

Once I received the parts I set them up on a stand (this will be used for portability).



We set it up (took around 20-30mins to line up) and performed speed tests using testmy.net/upload (this seemed to be ok for satellite speed tests) as well as the speed test tooway provide. On each test we got 1-5-1.8mbps upload which is great. From this we did a video stream test which seems to work ok at 1.3mbps (we usually tend to go for 0.9-1.1mbps max).

From this we are going to test it on an actual event (with backup obviously) on 10th March. So i will provide my finding from this.

So far my questions are below:

1) Changing sports is going to costs us around £30 each time. Luckily most our events are midlands and north so we have registered in spot 2 for now which was similar reception to spot 4 in birmingham.

2) transportation. the car/van is pretty rammed with cameras and servers so we may have to look into a trailer....more money

3) reliability/fix mounted on a portable stand. This will be a try and see thing. I think if its really windy we will have to revert to 3G

4) FAP - is the allowed sliding cap for download/upload i.e. can you use most of the cap for upload or is there an upload cap and a download cap?

This is quite exciting for us as this method is much cheaper than the £20,000 alternative.

Let me know if you guys have opinions and/or recommendations

Quote:

Tooway Live Video Streaming

Hi Eskemo,

I think the link below answers some of your questions, BBC reporter using a Tooway uplink from Athens for live broadcast.

Keep your stand as short as possible, it will be more stable.



click here. click here.

Post Broadcast Review:

Well we did it on Saturday and you'd be pleased to know it worked like a dream.

Setup of the connection was about 15-20mins. The stand was fairly solid, there was a bit of flex due to the pole length but this didn't seem to affect the signal.

Overall we were streaming to an RTMP server at a variable bitrate of an average of 900kbit/s (at points this would peak to 1600kbit/s) and we didn't have any queue issues (this is when the data isn't getting to the server quick enough so the PC queues it for sending), not even a little with is normal for RTMP. On 3G we would have a red level about once or twice, or at least some queuing during the broadcast.

Our total broadcast/online time was 6hours so this is very impressive. In terms of bandwidth/FAP, we managed to stream around 2GB over the period of 4hours yet on the 'checkportal' site we only managed to show one segment in the 1hr window so this is also quite good for us e.g. we could probably increase the quality of the stream.

The only issue we have now is transportation as this takes up a lot of space in the car so I'm looking into a custom built roof rack dish mount that I can fold down on transport.

Below are some pictures of the setup