WIRELESS BROADBAND provider Airspeed Telecom will be enabling video coverage of Election 2011 for RTÉ News live from the main political party press rooms and count centre locations throughout the country with its LiveLinx technology.

With coverage from more than 40 count centres on the day RTÉ will be using LiveLinx in eight of these locations and there is presently a permanent link installed in the Fianna Fáil press room, used for press party conferences.

LiveLinx, a joint venture company between Airspeed and Digital Space, is a high-speed IP video service with fixed camera units that allows for multiple live feeds straight to the newsroom without the need for a camera or technical crew present.

“Internationally the broadcast community has been slow to adopt IP as a technology,” said Liam O’Kelly, managing director of Airspeed. “Satellite will always have its place but new encoding technologies mean that IP video is more reliable and not as bandwidth intensive as it once was.”

It is very straightforward: the customer has a camera set up in a fixed position on premises, which is hooked up to Airspeed’s high-capacity licensed wireless link. The interviewee stands on a fixed spot in front of the camera and live footage is encoded in industry standard MPEG-4 and transmitted to its destination, for instance the RTÉ newsroom.

Airspeed’s first foray with the LiveLinx service was with stockbroking firms NCB, Davy and Merrion. This installations fed directly into the newsroom:

“Economic and financial stories are amongst the top three in every news bulletin and it costs money sending out a camera crew, presenter and satellite truck each time an expert analysis is required,” said O’Kelly.

While Airspeed has already delivered signals to the UK using LiveLinx, O’Kelly says there is further interest from media companies including Bloomberg, Sky and CNBC.

“As time goes on it looks as though UK media organisations will avail of this kind of service to broadcast content from Ireland back to their newsrooms.”