courtesy BH PhotoVideo

 

Teradek’s Bond device provides a unique twist to cellular transmission by hosting up to five 3G or 4G USB cellular modems and slicing up an H.264 stream so that its bandwidth can be divided among the modems. The Bond is just a single piece of a full system, albeit a uniquely powerful one.

To unlock this advance in mobile video transmission, Bond needs to work with, at the very least, a camcorder, an HDMI or HD-SDI encoder and a handful of USB cellular modems. These all connect directly to Bond as it sits atop a camcorder. Teradek’s Sputnik software, the solution for recombining those H.264 slices and generating a usable video stream, is included with Bond bundles. You might also need a decoder at the station end if you’re using Bond in broadcast workflows to feed a switcher. These elements can be purchased as packages, such as the Bond HD-SDI Broadcast Bundle, which puts together an H.264 encoder, a decoder, a Bond, an MPEG-TS license and 30 days of premium support from Teradek. There’s also a Bond HDMI Live Event Bundle, which pairs the Bond with the Cube 250 HDMI Encoder.

For a camera operator, a Teradek Bond setup weighs little and merely sips power. Stacking an encoder, such as a Cube 150 HD-SDI encoder, and a Bond device with modems atop your camera adds only about a pound, and dimensionally speaking, it’s essentially two decks of cards plus antenna-like festoons in the form of those USB cellular modems. The Bond, the Cube, and your camera can all share a battery, too.

For transmission from any area with adequate cellular coverage, Bond represents a convenient, compact, low-power HD transmission solution that carries minimal ongoing costs. Eliminating the charge for satellite bandwidth, Bond has an operating cost that’s limited to the data plans for the cellular modems. There will also be cloud-computing fees if you’ll use the Internet to host the Sputnik decoding application that comes with many Bond bundles and perhaps charges from Livestream or another streaming service if you’re going that route.

Transmission from the Field

If you blanch at the thought of relying on sometimes spotty cellular networks, Bond addresses that concern with technology that should allay your fear. Teradek’s Adaptive Internet Streaming technology adjusts transmission bit rates and buffering on the fly based on changing network conditions. Essentially, if your “bars” drop, your bit rate will, too, to keep the H.264 stream transmitting. So as long as you can get a signal of some kind, you’re in business. If one of your modems loses service, Bond’s baked-in technology redistributes the H.264 video stream with one fewer slice and tells the Cube to encode at a slightly lower bit rate. Teradek says that with high-quality modems, the interruption should only cause one frame to drop; at worst you’ll lose only a fraction of a second of video.

The field is an unpredictable environment to be sure, so it’s comforting that Bond’s light weight and low power consumption more or less eliminate the traditional pitfalls of operator strain and power depletion. Bond features a 2-pin LEMO connection for power input and a relay power output to keep the Cube encoder running. That power input can come from Teradek’s Cubit SWIT batteries, which come in Panasonic-, Canon- and Sony-style versions. The Bond itself draws only about 1 watt (not including the draw of the cellular modems), and the Cube 150 and Cube 250 both draw 2.5-3.8 watts.

The encoders that come with the HD-SDI Broadcast Bundle and the HDMI Live Event Bundle both have Wi-Fi antennae for streaming a live view of the captured video to an on-location device such as a laptop, iPad or other tablet. The line-of-sight range is about 300 ft (90 m).