Blackmagic Design announces Living As One, LLC, a global leader in multisite and live streaming solutions for houses of worship and corporations, has developed their popular Multisite Platform around the Blackmagic Design DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K and DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K. The products provide high quality capture and playback for Living As One’s flagship turnkey streaming solution designed to reliably live stream UltraHD video content to remote locations and to the web.
Texas based Living As One, LLC is focused on improving communications within and between geographically broad organizations. The company was founded in 2014 to fill a void in the professional video market for a resilient live streaming solution and now serves a growing number of multi-location non-profit and for-profit organizations around the world.
“The Living As One Multisite Platform delivers reliable, high quality video with zero loss to remote locations, and one of the ways that we make sure that happens is with the DeckLinks,” says Paul Martel, CEO of Living As One. “Our Encoders and Decoders ensure that 100% of video content is successfully transmitted throughout the entire streaming path, from the broadcast location, to our cloud transcoder, to any location in the world, even in the case of a complete internet outage. The DeckLinks have been reliable and affordable, allowing high quality capture and playout of professional video signals in a compact system.”
The Blackmagic Design DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K provides realtime video capture for the Multisite Encoder, while the DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K is used for live/DVR playback with the Multisite Decoder. According to the company release,“With this system, Living As One is able to provide flawless streaming of one UltraHD broadcast or two 1080p60 feeds with guaranteed synchronization at playback sites.”
Multisite Encoders, available in Single Channel and Dual Channel models, capture professional audio and video through HDMI and SDI and use either h.264 or h.265 (HEVC) codecs to compress one or two channels of video and up to 16 channels of synchronized audio. Feeds are then live streamed to the Living As One content delivery network, with the encoders automatically resending content that may be lost during transmission through a patented method, regardless of the duration of any network interruption.
The Multisite Decoder, which is designed with volunteer operators in mind, includes a simple to use video player that runs on dedicated hardware and allows playback and pausing of live video. Regardless of whether the video is playing or paused, Multisite Decoder’s advanced algorithms will continue to buffer live video ahead of time to a local SSD to prevent interruptions in playback. Living As One used the DeckLink SDK along with the DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K to create the Decoder application providing these zero content loss playback capabilities.
One of the features most useful to Living As One is the DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K and Mini Monitor 4Ks ability to support 16 channels of audio and any standard video format.
“By providing 16 channels of audio, the remote viewing experience can be way more immersive because audio from any element of an event can be streamed and played in remote locations in whatever way works for those venues. For example, Crossroads Church in Cincinnati Ohio broadcasts their band’s instruments and click track on individual audio channels so that the band’s at their remote campus can sync and play together. Other churches send audio from audience microphones to give an ‘in the room’ experience to viewer’s at remote venues. And some like the Global Leadership Summit send audio from multiple real time language translations which can be distributed locally at the remote venues with RF headsets or even a phone app. We were able to build these capabilities into our platform through the DeckLink’s easy to use SDK, which is another huge advantage from using Blackmagic Design,” Martel says.
“The Multisite Platform allows our church customers in particular to connect and share their messages across the globe, and the ease of use and reliability that the DeckLinks give us makes that possible,” he concludes. “With the introduction of the DeckLink product line Blackmagic removed the price barrier for developers to obtain high quality video capture and playout devices, and that allowed us at Living As One to focus on creating our resilient streaming platform. In effect, Blackmagic Design has helped us change the way organizations around the globe broadcast.”