Haivision Hub: What’s a Hublet and What Does it Do?

Since officially launching earlier this year, Haivision Hub, has been making a real splash. An easy-to-use video network service for securely and reliably transporting live IP video from anywhere to broadcast production resources on-premise or in the cloud, Haivision Hub is being used for high-profile sporting events such as the European Aquatics Championships and many other live events.  

A major feature of what makes Haivision Hub so attractive to broadcasters is how easy it is to set up cloud routing workflows. And at the core of this simplicity are Hublets. But what is a Hublet? In this blog post, we’re going to explain what a Hublet is, how they work in Haivision Hub, and how Hublets can help you streamline your live video cloud routing workflows.

What is a Hublet?

At the simplest level, Hublets are connectors that bring live video, audio, and metadata in and out of Haivision Hub. They are the building blocks of Haivision Hub cloud routes and make it fast and easy to connect routes together, no matter where in the world your feeds start or end.

There are three basic types of Hublets – Input, Output, and Process – and we’re going to discuss all of them.

What Do Hublets Do?

To start with, Hublets let you set up the input and output points into your Haivision Hub workflows. For instance, if you want to send a live contribution feed using the SRT protocol from an event location in Europe to broadcast production resources in the United States, here’s what you do.

Start by adding an SRT Input Hublet to a new route, select the SRT parameters such as Caller/Listener mode and encryption settings, then indicate the European geographic region where the input is taking place (making the first mile hop to the cloud as short as possible).

Then you add an SRT Output Hublet to your route, select a US-based region closest to the broadcast resources (on-premises or in the cloud) and configure your SRT settings. At this point, you can point-and-click to connect your Input and Output Hublets together and start the route. Haivision Hub then takes care of setting up the cloud resources in the regions they are needed and automatically provides configuration information like IP address and port values so you can connect you edge devices to Hub and route your live streams. And Hublets provide telemetry information so you can easily monitor your live streams.     

There are Input and Output Hublets that support the following protocols: SRT, RTMP, RTP, and MPEG-TS. There are also Output Hublets that make it very easy to send your live routes to social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook.

A given route can have one input and many outputs, all in different regions. Hublets make it easy to build these routes.  

To see a demo of Haivision Hub, watch the video:

Connecting Makito Encoders to Haivision Hub

There is also a special Input Hublet that you can use to connect a Makito X or X4 video encoder edge device into a Haivision Hub routing workflow. To use these Hublets, once you pair your encoder to Haivision Hub, you can add the Makito encoder as an input source to a route – and control the encoder settings – all in a single browser window without leaving the Haivision Hub user interface.

What About Process Hublets?

A Process Hublet is a special kind of Hublet that is applied between your input and outputs to modify the contents of your live feed inside the Haivision Hub cloud in real time. An example of a Process Hublet is the Real-time Transcoder. This Hublet is typically used to transcode an input stream for compatibility with downsteam endpoints. For instance, you might want to transcode a high bitrate stream to a lower bitrate for output to a mobile device. Or you might want to convert 1080p HEVC codec to 720p H264 for delivery to YouTube. When you add a Process Hublet to your route, just as with Input and Output Hublets, Haivision Hub automatically spins up the cloud resources where you need them, so you don’t have to worry about managing or maintaining the cloud video networking infrastructure components.

The Akamai Hublet combines real-time processing and output into one Hublet. It provides real-time transcoding of Haivision Hub routes into Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) ladders packaged for delivery to audiences via Akamai’s CDN, allowing you to make high-quality live feeds available to audience watching anywhere. And, again, as part of Haivision Hub, you can leverage this transcoding on-demand with no infrastructure to manage.  

How Can Hublets Help My Workflows?

Hublets are the critical elements that allow Haivision Hub to “glue” together broadcast cloud routing workflows. With Hublets, Haivision Hub provides a flexible, secure, and reliable option for transporting your streams into, through, and out of the cloud.

Hublets also allow third-party applications to “plug” into Haivision Hub, so that live video can be routed across a highly-reliable, low latency SRT backbone to cloud resources anywhere, and, if needed, bridged back into Haivision Hub for routing to other on-premises or cloud applications in your downstream workflow.

If you want to find out more about how to use Hublets to easily build custom, scalable and on-demand broadcast workflows, or want to know more about Haivision Hub, book a demo.