AirSpeed Telecom and Digital Space

AirSpeed Telecom and Digital Space launch a unique service called Livelinx that brings live expert commentary straight to newsrooms
Livelinx service offers time and financial savings for broadcasters looking to reduce satellite uplink fees and the cost of sending crews to interviewsAirSpeed Telecom, the telecommunications company which operates a nationwide licensed wireless radio transmission network, together with Digital Space, has launched Livelinx, a new broadcasting venture which allows organisations deliver live expert commentary straight to newsrooms across the country.

Livelinx offers both financial and timesavings to broadcasters looking to reduce satellite uplink fees and the cost of sending a crew to conduct interviews.Livelinx content is currently being delivered to RTE and AirSpeed Telecom and Digital Space have also received inquiries from UK broadcasters about the service.
The Livelinx service has already been installed in Irish stockbroker firms NCB Stockbrokers, Davy and Merrion Stockbrokers to link them to RTE. A broadcasting set-up, including camera, audio feed and dedicated connectivity into the RTE newsroom, was established inside each participating firm, allowing studio-based presenters to remotely interview the financial experts on the day's markets news.
The captured audio and video from the remote site is encoded as MPEG-4 and carried on a high-capacity licensed wireless link using the IP protocol. Each stockbroker location has its own dedicated connection into the AirSpeed Telecom network, where Quality of Service (QoS) is used to protect the broadcast quality of the stream. The content is transmitted to RTE and decoded at the broadcaster's site, where it is fed directly into the newsroom.
Broadcast content has been carried on IP before, but it's only now that all the tools, including less bandwidth-hungry encoding technologies, have allowed a system like Livelinx to be made available as an affordable service.

Liam O'Kelly, Managing Director, AirSpeed Telecom, comments:
"AirSpeed Telecom are short-circuiting the traditional process and travel and uplink costs by putting a remote camera into business locations, fully automated with a pre-set shot and audio capability.
The remote camera acts exactly as if it's a studio camera and the interviewee just clips on the mic to begin the interview."
"Broadcasters will not use a service like Livelinx unless there are cast iron protections against jitter and latency on the network.
Livelinx has been engineered to keep the streams continuously protected, with uncontended point-to-point licensed wireless links as the carrier network."
"The broadcasters are very impressed with what this technology has proven it can do. The applications are exciting and Irish organisations really do have the chance to make their expertise available to broadcasters anywhere."
Originally a broadcast engineer by profession, Liam O' Kelly directed AirSpeed Telecom's development of the service and oversaw extensive trials of IP-carried feeds over licensed wireless, including streams from the Global Irish Economic Forum in Farmleigh last October.