HaiTide European Webinar: Haivision Hub

Hi, everyone. Welcome to HaiTide. And as is tradition, we’re going to let people join and I’ll start us off with this quick little intro video.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So, welcome, everyone. As I said, this is HaiTide. I’m your host, Jose Chudoba. Pleasure to have you all here, whether it’s your first time or you’re a returning guest. Let’s get started. So this week we have a little bit of an awkward situation. I’ll go more into detail on that after I introduce our guest speakers. But for today, we have Giovanni Baldini, who you met in the past. He’s our sales manager in southern Europe.

And then our two new guest speakers coming on for the first time are my former boss, Pablo Hesse, the senior director at Cloud Strategy and production development in Madrid, and Miguel Serrano, the VP of Cloud Production Development, also in Madrid. So as you can see, it’s a little bit awkward here– what I was mentioning in the beginning– because my current boss Peter and former boss Pablo. So guys, try not to make it too awkward, behave a little bit and I promise I’ll behave as well.

And so today, we brought on Pablo and Miguel to talk a little bit about Haivision Hub. This is a product that we’ve gone into a little bit of detail a couple of times on these webinars, but not too much. And we wanted to use this platform to give you guys– our audience– a chance to learn more about Haivision Hub and the benefits and uses that it can bring to you and your customers.

So before we get started actually, I think it’s been successful the last couple of times, so I want to launch another poll. And here, you guys, it should be popping up on your screen now. But we have a question– two questions actually. So the first is one, have you heard of Haivision Hub before today? This is to get a feel of who’s in the audience so far and their knowledge of it.

And two, would you be interested in discussing Haivision Hub after this webinar with one of our Ses to find out more? This way we have your contact information, and we have one of our eskies reach out to you directly so you can have a one on one call. And as I let the audience fill this out a little bit, I’m going introduce my current boss, Peter, to talk a little bit about Haivision Hub and give you guys a quick secondary intro to it. So, Peter.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Jose. Thank everybody for joining. Haivision Hub is very special because it’s something we have invested a lot of time and money and energy in, but it’s not a product that our channels can sell. It is meant for end users direct, and it’s not meant as something that’s sellable by my partners.

That’s not the first time that Haivision has done something like that. We have a tool called the Play App, which is also a free to use tool. It doesn’t cost any money. We have developed the SRT protocol. We have built, designed, and developed it. Before that, our engineers have been key in helping to define protocols like H.264, H.265, like KLV.

We have a lot of initiatives to the industry to make life better for everybody, and not everything we do is direct sellable and profitable. But the Haivision Hub is somewhere in the middle because it does take care of all the traffic, all the traffic that covers distances, but it doesn’t take care of the edges.

On the edges of your solution, you still need encoders, you still need decoders, you still need local gateways to make it work. And that’s where our partners are very important. Because once this highway piece is set at the Haivision Hub, the edges need to be taken care of. And it’s great to have Miguel and Pablo here in the meeting because they have been managing this process, they have worked a lot with Microsoft. They use the Microsoft Azure going forward. And great guys that you can give this a run through a demo on what’s inside. So, back to you.

So, then, Pablo, I’ll hand it over to you on this side. And before we actually get started, it seems like 100% of our audience has actually heard about Haivision Hub before, so you’re talking to people who are familiar with it, which is a great sign to me to be honest.

Our marketing is doing a great job. Our marketing is doing–

[LAUGHTER]

Excellent. So, Pablo, welcome, and the floor is yours.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me today and allowing me to tell you more about the Haivision Hub. It’s great to hear that most of you guys heard before about Haivision Hub. So let’s go to it, right? I mean, it’s like, what is Haivision Hub? What can do for customers, and so on.

So Haivision Hub is what we call intelligent media routing. So we stopped for video service provider who need to transport live video for confidential production or syndication workflows, and all over the cloud. I mean, there’s like a Bolivian satellite, or fiber dedicated expensive cost. Just a way to move all those processes into the internet and leveraging the cloud basically.

It has a simple interface just like where people with a extensive knowledge, or in a matter of minutes. And this is something that we will highlight later, so I can create their workflows and routes is like immediately as I was saying. The whole power of Haivision Hub is based on what we call hublets. Hublets are nodes, that we call them the way to just like for one purpose. Just like this for input and output video. And those are connectors.

So just like you can create on the dashboard, and we will see that later on as well. Just like that, you can create one input video, and move that video to an output source. There are some sources that we support right now. The most frequent or the famous protocol of course is SRT. Although, it’s not only SRT based. Haivision Hub and this is important is multi-protocol.

So this means that we support this like all the protocols that are done in SRT. And also, it was like we have proprietary Haivision hot plates. And also, we are building an ecosystem of third

party hot plates to be included into the hub. For instance, we already have Akamai. And there are others like Facebook, YouTube, and we’re working every day on having more and more.

and I actually have a question from the audience here in audience. Imagine this every week. If you have any questions, please feel free to type in the Q&A and I’ll read it to our panelists. So the question I actually have here is, is there a limit on the distance you can stream with Hub? I guess they’re asking is it more local or can it be used internationally?

That’s a really good question. I can say it’s both. I mean, it’s Haivision stuff for multi-region So it’s like we can send video just like from North America to Japan. Like go from Japan, to Brazil or something like that. So it’s like it supports multiple workflows and is not limited by regions. And it can also like transport video within the same region and it’s like if you’re one of the states of the United States, you can move video within that same state without any problem at all.

Nice. And I’m sure that’s becoming very impactful now for COVID when people are stuck like the three of us are stuck in Madrid right now.

Right. Right, absolutely. That’s a really good use case right now it is like where working from home for contribution is becoming key. And more and more tools like Haivision Hub are needed to be used for contribution and production.

So tell us and I’ll move on to the next slide here. Tell us a little bit about the benefits that Haivision Hub offers?

Yeah. I think this is the more than the most important part, right. I mean, what can I do with that tool and what allows me to do. And what are the key concepts. And we divide these into four key concepts. Or I would say 3 plus 1 because it’s the simplicity of the tools, the flexibility and also the reliability. And I say plus 1 because the last one is the pricing. And the pricing is in line with the price of all the previous concepts. I mean, when the pricing is simple and it’s flexible. We wanted to make it this way because we detected that there are other solutions and other ways to transport video that were far away complicated to configure a keyboard and so on. And we based all the pricing on consumer hours.

That way, it’s very simple there to a create a route and it’s very simple to understand the price you need to be a physics engineer to understand the prices of moving video across the internet. Because of that, we understood that was a problem and we wanted to solve it.

Someone like myself could figure it out, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. And you’re pretty smart, Jose. No worries about it. No, I mean it’s thought in that sense. I mean, we understood that it seems that the tool is pretty flexible and simple. The pricing needed to be the same way. So it is like case of VLA. And with more detail– well, I would say that’s just there’s a couple of things with more detail. The simplicity, something that I previously mentioned right. I mean, it’s like you can create a route without extensive knowledge in a very simple way, saving a lot of time and flexibility. You asked me the question. I mean, it’s like you can create a lot of routes and configure it to your own needs.

If you want to multi-region, let’s do it. If you want to do within the same region, you can do it. If you want support multi-protocol. You can do it just like movie in SRT to where RTMP and so on. Those are things that you’re capable of doing with a tool. And lastly, and I think most importantly as well, is now we leverage technologies like SRT and the outsourced cloud. I mean, it’s like we use them both and we include all that within the same package. You know there’s like no difference using the tool from the cloud service. So We Bundle both services as like tool for the rest of the two were for the foreign customers.

You’re on mute, Peter.

The most famous quote of 2020.

I’d like to add something here. So although Haivision Hub is not something you can sell if your customers spend a lot of money on a satellite link, or working with another company to cover the distances, it could make sense to talk about Haivision Hub. Because if they would use Hub, probably their costs of moving video will go down. And most likely, their budgets to spend more money on the edge of the technology will go up. So there is a key element here where you can help your customers saving time. It’s much faster, increase the low latency because we were pretty fast and also reduce costs. And that can open up budgets for other pieces of the project

Yeah and I actually have another question here from the audience. So question is multi-routing from Hub to Haivision Gateway, is it possible? I’m not sure if you probably want to take this or maybe Miguel, you want to step in and answer this.

What is the question again, Jose?

So I have here from the audience so they asked if multi-routing from hub to Haivision Gateway, if it’s possible.

Yeah, sure. The end point maybe could be any Haivision that speaks SRT or RTMP. So yes, you could use those devices as the starting point or the ending point. Yeah.

OK. So hopefully that answers your question from the audience. And a question I have myself just to kind of inform the audience a little bit as well. You guys mentioned the cloud a bunch. So is this something that’s solely based in the cloud, or can this be presented on premise as well?

I know you want to take the last one, Miguel.

Yeah. So the Hub, as it is defined and designed and in production now, is fully deployed in the cloud. And that’s the first model that we are marketing quite successfully. It is also true that we are contemplating in a significant part of the roadmap, is also aimed to be able to deploy to have on-prem. So the same intelligence and the same technology something that you can deploy in-prem. This is going to come into the market for the need next year or so. Is going to be basically expanding the same capabilities that you can deploy in the cloud, but also on-prem.

OK. From my understanding, it’s something that’s in the works and hopefully we can bring to you guys soon. And then one more question. I know Julia, you’re eager to speak and show the demo for our audience as well. But one more question that I have here from the audiences I guess they’ve heard of Haivison Hub before and they used to know as SRT Hub. What was with the name change behind that? Is Miguel, or Pablo?

Yeah. So I mean, as like previously it was named SRT Hub. But soon we realized that it was like it was very named to SRT. And as I mentioned before, Haivision Hub is multi-protocol. So we support any kind of workload you guys may have. And we didn’t want to constrain the use of the tool to just one name or something. So remember, it is not supporting only HD. It’s supporting multiple protocols and that’s why we decided to change from SRT Hub to Haivision Hub. Because our vision for the problem is much bigger than only using one of our supported or creative products.

Just to point on one thing, which is important, it supports multiple protocols in the input and the output. But the protocol that we run inside is actually as a protocol that we as a company invented. And that’s a protocol in which we rely in terms of low latency and reliability. So you a customer can ingest in different protocols. And you can output different protocols. Therefore, we also translate from protocol A to protocol B if you need that. But what runs inside the platform is SRT, which we would deem to be the most secure and reliable.

OK. Makes sense. And then as a marketing guy myself I think it’s a smart move so you can expand your market reaching and who actually comes in to you to ask about not only SRT Hub, but Haivision Hub as a whole. So cool. Thank you for that guys. And audience, I’ll keep monitoring the Q&A if you have any further questions. But now, he’s been eager to do it. I know we’ve been talking all week. I’d like to introduce– well, welcome back actually Giovanni Baldini from Italy. And he’s actually going to present a live demo for you guys today on Haivision Hub. Welcome.

OK. Jose, you have to meet me in person because I know that you get to talk. But I’m a very shy guy.

Or because COVID, I haven’t had the opportunity to meet really any of you in person. So hopefully that’ll happen.

I know. So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to share my screen. So you can unshare yours. And I’m going to walk you through the creation of the project. Like let’s call it on the Haivision Hub. So this is how it presents itself. If you can see it everything, confirm it. OK. This is the main page of the… the welcome page of the Haivision Hub. Sorry I’m used to calling it SRT Hub. So we’re going to just create a new route and a few output tablets just to give the sense to the audience how easy it is. And how short it takes to create a complete workflow from scratch.

So we’re going to give it a name. We can select the duration and limit the extent that we can run 24 hours. For configuration, you can set the time limit to 9 and we can stop working automatically after that. So we’re going to start with the input tablets. We have here the input that we have. So SRT input, very straightforward. If you have an SRT enabled the encoder, or

gateway, or whatever, you can to send SRT content to the input tablet, input as well if you can stream up to the input tablet. And Haivision play from mobile is a very eased designed tablet to allow people to create any tablet that relies on a very simple interface in which you can automatically set a stream from your phone.

So let’s give it a name. I have got the Makito here. I will show you how to set it up. So we call it Makito. Here, you can select your region. So you’ll see that many region all over the world. So I’m going to use West Europe as entrance and select the mode. Color this now. It’s very convenient to use this now because most of the time probably your encoder is in a place like you don’t have access to IP. And if you have to stream it, the fact that the Haivision Hub is in this and you can just point to it and the setup is very good.

Select the latency, of course. And the passcode for this particular test we’re just enabling it just so we are faster and in creating the output itself. OK. So that we can– yeah?

No, no, no. I was going to say because I know we have some time here while you’re creating this. Sorry to interrupt. But we actually have a question. Well, really for the three of you. Here, we have so does the input protocol must always be the output protocol? Or can we change RTMP input to SRT out like a format conversion?

Absolutely. You can flip the protocol, you can go inside the Haivision Hub RTMP, and go out with an output tablet without any issues.

Perfect. So if you want to continue.

OK. Just for the sake of the demo, do I will select again, West Europe because my encoder are just in the same place. But imagine that you have to send some contribution from Europe to anywhere in the world. East Asia, you can just select the output of that to pop up in East Asia. So it’s closer to be receiving the various that will be in East Asia. So for the sake of demo, I will select West Europe, but you can be able to choose whatever output place you like and go from there. Everything runs on Azure backbone so the connection between the two places is very fast and secure.

Again, I will set it in my listener mode just as before. I will remove the encryption just to be faster. And create it. We create another Apple tablet. Let’s do a mobile output. I will use my phone to show it. OK. And because I like to do things in a difficult way, let’s add also Facebook of the MPLs. So what we’re going to do, we are going to give it a name. Facebook. OK.

It’s a good quality to have because then you’re always challenging yourself.

Yes. And I already opened here the Facebook page for that extreme for my personal page so that we really see before.

If you guys want to dot down his Facebook information and send him friend request here, you’re more than welcome to.

The pop up menu from Zoom is always coming down.

Yeah.

And it’s difficult to reach the right tab. OK.

So Joe, if you don’t mind while you’re creating this, could you go a little bit into detail of the differences between SRT Gateway and SRT Hub? Or maybe like the main differences.

So I’d like to call the Haivision Hub like a super gateway. Because when we usually use the SRT Gateway, the silicon on-premise with a machine in the Cloud. We usually use that for workflow that’s already very strong and the transportation probably between point A and point B. Even closer results, maybe Europe to Europe, or maybe Europe to Asia but not very, very far locations. The Haivision Hub the other end gives you the opportunity to send the content from point A to point B over the world without latency issues. There are so many things you have to take into account when you create an SRT connection between two points may that be the connection RTT and et cetera. Sorry OK.

So this is how you create one– I don’t know for whatever reason. OK. I just made a mistake. Well, let me do it very fast again. Sorry for that.

It’s fine. Don’t worry, Joe. I mean this is the thing about doing stuff live, you’re kind of put on the spot.

I refresh the page by mistake.

Really, it’s my fault since I put you on the spot with a question while you’re working on something.

Fix on that. OK. Fix on that.

If you guys want–

What I was saying is that the Haivision Hub allows you, without taking into account the connection, you have because the connection will be between two points inside the backbone. So the connection will be much faster than the usual internet that they’re going to use. And also much more reliable because of the underlying connection between the Azure entry point that you’ll use.

Essentially, the alternative of using the Hub would be typically using any other Cloud provider like Azure, or Amazon, or Google or you name it. And that’s typically a process which is highly cumbersome. So it takes a long to create all the components, to create all the infrastructure, to create computing resources, and network, load balancing, kubernetes, and that stuff. Actually, when Giovanni is clicking all the stuff, right after he clicks on “start the route,” which is the bottom that you see in the top right corner, right.

What happens basically is that everything that you need to deploy in the cloud happens automatically. And it takes around 90 seconds in total to have the whole route active. If you do that manually instead of 90 seconds, it’s going to take you around 30 minutes, 40 minutes probably, if you are kind of familiar with the whole system. And it’s pretty prone to mistakes, to errors, while the Hub is taking care of all these processing automatically for you with no possibility of error, right. So what Giovanni is doing right now is connecting the input and the output. In that moment, the start route moment is where all the magic comes, right.

Yes.

Because 90 seconds, everything that you would need to do manually, again, is going to take you a long if you do manually, and with many pauses of errors, it’s going to happen automatically.

And then, while this actually downloads, we have another question from the audience. So I have here, is it possible to create own branded hublets for playout to an SRT browser app?

Is it possible to create? Yes, OK. I think I get the question. Yes, we have a way to create custom hublets in which you define the parameters as long as they support the protocols and the output. Yes, you can define your own hublets and you name them as you want. And you give them the parameters they require. And you will have those hublets available only for your account. What you create is only available for you, is not available for any other customer using the Hub. But you have the ability of creating your own special hublets if that’s what you’re thinking.

OK. I think that was the question from the audience member. Cool. And then while this is creating as well, I guess we should let people know. I know some of them answered… the information… how they can get in contact with you guys to form a part of Haivision Hub. Who’s the best person maybe to reach out to if they’re interested in learning more about Haivision Hub? Would it be you, Miguel? Would it be you, Pablo? Or maybe a specific set one of the region sales engineers?

I think there are many people that can answer this. And what Miguel, and Pablo have been doing lately is providing material to the fields to myself with Giovanni to everybody. And that we are able to help customers understanding the details, giving explanations. But also on hands demo. We have accounts that we can use. So Giovanni is now using the machines in his own laboratories on the demo space. But what we can do anything we want.

So if customers, or if your customers if you are a partner, want to know more about Hub, connect with anybody from our team to start. And if it’s really super complex or big, or touching on the spaces where we don’t have solutions yet, you will get Miguel, you will get Pablo in the room. And probably more people if needed. Hub is also still in development. But the team, within Haivision that can answer the Hub and can do demos is there. And it’s everybody. Everybody in the field team so. Yeah.

OK. So as you guys may have noticed, the creation of the project was completed. What I did in the meantime while Peter was talking, I copied all the information from the IP address to point in the Haivision input tablet path. I went to my Makito X Encoder which is getting some video

here. So 1080p 50. I created the project on my Makito. I put on the information to point to the Haivision Hub input, and I started it. So if we go back to the– sorry.

Here, we see that we are receiving video. So the encoder is streaming correctly to the input. So the Facebook app hublet started automatically. So in theory, if I go here, I should be able to see the streaming there. I want to publish it because probably if I send the state television broadcast on YouTube, the people will hunt me down with police.

But just for the sake of the demo, this is working just fine. I’m saving the stream. I can connect the decoder here. So if I go to my Makito X for decoder, I will stop this one. I will go down there to my Haivision Hub project that I already created on my encoder. I will copy the IP address left to call for the contribution. Basically here, apply the changes, and start it back. OK it’s already working I’m assuming 1920 by 1080p 50 on my decoder so everything works fine. And the last thing that I’m going to do, I don’t know how big you can see me on the webcam. Can you guys see me?

In the meantime, so you know, when you see that green arrow in each one of the ovals means that there’s active traffic going on and the input has active traffic. Two out of the three outputs have the traffic. And the only one that is so far ready, but not streaming is the Play Pro, which is the one that Giovanni has now.

OK. What I’m going to do now– I have we have an application, which is called the play app on my phone. What I’m going to do, I’m going to open the camera application on my phone, I’m going to select the Play Pro hublet. You will have some information, one of which is a QR code that will pop up here. And if I go with my phone, the pop up here from the camera will appear. And if I click it in a matter of seconds, we should connect, and you should be able to see in a few seconds the streaming that I am sending. So this is a very old ski footage but it’s working just fine.

And if I go back here, you’ll see that the hublet turned green because my phone made the connection with the Haivision Hub and it’s working perfectly.

So what you saw– and just let me give you a 1 minute summary of what happened. In five minutes, Germany created an input, three outputs, all the class resources that you need in order to make it work, happen automatically, in 1 minute or 2 minutes. And then the use is absolutely straightforward. It’s super simple. The flexibility in the operations is immediate. And that’s exactly the value that you are seeing with the product.

Of course, what you see is just one input tablet and three output tablets. But nothing stops you to have more input tablets at the same time, the same project, right.

And I only wanted to add that he did all that while answering Jose’s question. He likes to make things difficult on himself.

And just a little bit of an experiment– so you saw the workflow is very easy. It’s pretty straightforward, and we stop sharing so you can see us bigger. I will move my webcam. I don’t

know how well you can see, but I have all my gear. This is the Makito Encoder, this is the Makito Decoder, this is the source. It’s not very stable. This is the source and this is the video feed coming back from the source. I tried to go away not too bright, my webcam doesn’t stand it. But the latency is around 400 milliseconds so it’s just super fast.

How is the latency impacted that if you cross continents, if you travel long distances?

Shouldn’t be much higher than that because as we’ve said, everything runs over the Azure infrastructure. So if you try it, it’s going to be negligible. Not much higher than that. And for the question before, of course, you can connect the SRT Hub through existing output or input tablets inside the Haivision Hub.

Cool. So then the question we have here as well is, how would you make a redundant connection between an encoder and a decoder on one single, but multiple routes?

So–

Redundancy is something that we are working on now as we speak. The next version, the same version that will have a potential deployment on-prem will also have an automatic active-passive configuration. For now, what we recommend is just duplicating the whole path end to end. And we can detect when one path is down and inform you. But it’s something that has to be done manually for now.

OK. And then we’ll take one more final question from the audience guys. Because we try to keep this to 30 minutes and we’re running a little over time. But I have here, what kind of process hublets exist today and can you tell what is expected to be added in the near future?

Pablo, you want to take that?

Sure, absolutely. So right now, what we have is the Akamai process Hublet for encoding. And it was like those two in one because it’s also transforms the video into HLS for output video. So there’s like this does the existing one. And we’re planning, with other companies in there in the space, to have more. I mean, there are conversations right now and we hopefully can tell you more of what this is like in the future.

Things that are ready are graphic overlays, and storing live to VOD or live to file, to be more precise.

I’ve got a question as well. So now, it took like half an hour more or less demo. How efficient is that the normal time Miguel, and Pablo, and Giovanni we need? If you do have them, or how much time is used? Is it an hour, is it half an hour?

No, to do a demo, if you go straight to the point to a demo, it can take you between 5 to 10 minutes trying to explain each step. If you are actually operating the platform and you need to create a route from scratch, not a demo, a real operation, it’s going to take you anywhere from 2 to 5

OK. Today, is pretty good. In half an hour we covered a lot.

Yeah.

We built it and we explained it.

Exactly.

Well, while answering my questions at the same time, you’re not so shy. I mean the Joe I met has been very friendly guy that loves to talk.

Well, first of all, sorry for refreshing the page at the wrong time.

No worries, no worries.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

If anything, it gave us more time to ask questions and answer questions from the audience. So it’s kind of a blessing in disguise. So guys, here’s the contact information for Miguel, Pablo, and Giovanni, if you’re interested in reaching out to them. But as Peter said, reach out to your local sales engineer if you want to find out more about Haivision Hub, or SRT Gateway, or other products that we offer. But in the meantime, hopefully this served as a good introduction to what Haivision Hub offers and the different benefits it uses and uses it has and will have in the upcoming future.

So this is a quick little spotlight that I do on other things going on that Haivision, I mentioned it last week. Thursday, tomorrow actually, we have another customer spotlight from our behind the streams webinar series over in Montreal. And as I mentioned last week, we’re doing this with elevation church. If you joined us a couple of weeks ago for the House of Worship webinar, this will have a same kind of feel to it and a deep dive as well.

And yeah, that’s it. I see you guys had a bunch of questions today. Hopefully, that keeps going as we do these more and more. It means you guys are getting more comfortable with us and likewise. Future themes, again, just as Miguel and Pablo did with me last week, if you’re interested in coming on and speaking, you’re more than welcome to. Please reach out to either myself, or Peter, or even your local sales engineer. They’ll get in contact with me and we’ll set that up. So yeah. Hopefully, you guys can join us next week. Thank you everyone. Thank you Pablo, Peter, Miguel, and Giovanni for joining us kindly today. And have a good one. Take care guys.

Have a great day. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye.