Covering the biggest Presidential Election in recent years

The US Presidential Election has always been a global event – with millions of eyes from hundreds of countries glued to their TVs and phones for up-to-the-minute updates on where each candidate stands in the race for the White House.

But no one could have imagined that the run up to the 2024 US Presidential Election would have as much movement, excitement, uncertainty, and contention as this year’s race.  

As broadcasters know – no matter who wins the race – this all makes for compelling TV.

From sound bites to rallies, in-studio and call-in remote interviews, international, national, and local broadcasters have potential to win ratings and increase their ad dollars throughout Election Season coverage.

LiveU has been an important tool to bring this coverage to global audiences. We proved time and time again in delivering reliability and the highest quality when faced with cell congestion – especially for a night like Election Night. With thousands of people at Howard University and in West Palm Beach for both candidate’s planned victory events, broadcasters needed to ensure they had enough bandwidth to not only get the victory and concession speeches, but also capture crowd reactions, interviews, and all of the action and excitement that comes with a night like Election Night.

LiveU Technology in the field

With more than 4,000 LiveU units deployed to cover Election Day, the largest fleet of LiveU encoders deployed for a single event ever, the world renowned LiveU Customer Support machine clicked smoothly into overdrive, adding an additional layer of reassurance to customer crews on the ground.

LiveU’s LU800 production field unit led the way with deployments across hundreds of scenarios – from REMI productions that had camera crews in NY, LA, DC, and West Palm Beach – with content feeds being sent to servers in the UK, Italy, Spain, Asia, Africa and everywhere else you can imagine, as well as local live hits.

LiveU Matrix, the IP-video distribution network also played a big role in the Election Day coverage. The video distribution platform allowed broadcasters to share and receive high-quality, low-latency live feeds with, and from, broadcasters around the globe.  LiveU Matrix allowed broadcasters to form news pools so they could simply and swiftly share live content between them.  This allowed them to cover more ground – getting the sound bites from voters in battleground states and at campaign headquarters – among other locations.

LiveU Ingest, as it did in the recent Japanese General Elections, played a pivotal role for many news gathering organizations. The automatic recording and story metadata tagging solution allowed our customers to process video faster in the field.

One customer noted, “It totally relieved me of making tough decisions about what to record. It was great knowing everything was automatically recorded.”  

And added, “Our digital teams loved the fact that the LiveU Ingest records in MP4 format! We would normally have to convert the file which saved us this step.”  

Reliability at the core

With both campaign locations providing accessible LAN connectivity, many customers opted to utilize this in conjunction with LiveU Mobile data connectivity, allowing LRT™ (LiveU Reliable Transport, the original and best video-over-bonded-IP transport protocol) to optimize the connection performance and deliver the most resilient connection possible.

For other marquee events in the Election cycle, like the earlier RNC and DNC, LiveU provided customers with the option of adding LiveU Private Connectivity to the mix, giving them uncontested connectivity via a dedicated Private 5G connection.  This option will be made available for the inauguration and other selected red-carpet events. Read the full case study.  

LiveU Support

LiveU’s award-winning support is not self-proclaimed. In fact, we have won industry awards for the level of support that our global team provides on a daily basis. Our customers know they can count on us every single day. But for Election Day, we pulled out all the stops. With on-the-ground engineers ready to support and arm broadcasters with more gear at both candidate’s camps to 24/7 phone and email support. A special Election Day taskforce was formed with 20+ product and technical support staff on a Microsoft Teams “Command Center” call for 15+ hours monitoring feeds, sharing feedback, and assisting with support requests to ensure our global customers stayed online and received the best quality content for their audiences.  

“This was the longest Teams call ever,” remarked one tired but happy Sales Engineer.  

On our post-mortem Election Day sales call, the team shared stories of how LiveU came through for customers – providing access to features, maintaining connections in truly troublesome rural and congested areas, and providing backup equipment when a competitor’s product just wasn’t holding up.  

And the calls and emails from customers sealed the deal. Our award-winning team delivered on their promises and created a new standard for supporting high-profile events. We applaud their hard work and dedication to our customers. That is something the company prides itself on. Always innovating and putting the customer’s needs first.  

An International Affair

Production companies like BC Live Productions, Broadcast Management Group, and Svet Solutions Media coordinated several hours of live coverage to international broadcasters in Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, etc.  

“During this unprecedented U.S. presidential election, we provided extensive coverage with several LiveU units deployed across different regions of the United States, offering almost 48 hours of nonstop coverage during and after election night, for clients across Europe, including Italy,” said Luca Rovinalti, CEO, Svet Solutions Media.  

“We chose to use the latest LiveU field units with HEVC and H.265 transmission, combined with LiveU LU-Net 5G dongles, to ensure a reliable and stable connection for both candidates’ headquarters and key swing states that ultimately decided the outcome of the election. As with most of our productions, LiveU enabled us to move our crews efficiently across the U.S. without the need for traditional live production equipment, providing one of the most reliable solutions available for producing high-quality content delivered overseas.”  

LiveU – At Your Service

Every day we work to exceed our customers’ expectations – from a technology and support standpoint. Based on the emails, calls, and Slack messages, we are confident that our customers “felt the love” on Election Day. We look forward to partnering with our customers for Inauguration Day, as well as other flagship events on the horizon like the 2026 FIFA™ World Cup.

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