HaiTide European Webinar: Haivision Play Pro App

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to HaiTide. As is tradition, I’m going to start with a quick little intro video and give people the opportunity to join us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So welcome, everyone, to the 13th edition of HaiTide. I’m your host, Jose Chudoba. If it’s your first time here, welcome. If it’s your second or multiple times, welcome back. Let’s get started.

So for today, it might be a surprise to you, but we’re actually having a more podcast approach, as we’re doing a one-on-one conversation between me and my teammate, Sebastian Manemann, who’s our technical pre-sales engineer in Europe over at Haivision. And the reason we brought on Sebastian today was because– so last week, if you were able to join us, we actually spoke and brought on Miguel Serrano, Pablo Hesse and Giovanni Baldini to speak about Haivision Hub. And we did a quick little live demo there. And we wanted to kind of feed off of that and continue in that sense.

Today, Sebastian will do a live demo, as well, but this time specifically on the Play Pro app. And the reason we’re speaking on the Play Pro app today is because, if you haven’t heard about it in the news yet, we actually just won an award at the NAB show for product of the year. So we kind of wanted to run with it a little bit. You know, we’re in the news… we want to present it to you guys, as we brought it up a couple of times in HaiTide. But as we’ve done in the past, the things we bring up, we want to go specifically into it.

So before we get started and I give over the controls to Sebastian, I wanted to come up– well, I came up with another poll question for you guys. And since we are talking about an application, we’re talking about mobile phones. So the question I have for you, the audience, today is, how many hours do you think you spend on your mobile phone in one day?

I know I myself am a little bit addicted, honestly. I try not to do it during work. Don’t tell Peter, Sebastian, but I try not to. And I think, on average, I’d be in between the three and five, depending if I use it for work or not. How about you, Sebastian? How many hours a day do you think you spend on your phone?

Honestly, I fear I’m a six-pluser.

Yeah, I mean, it’s something that–

Partly for work. Most of it not, though.

I try to say the same thing, but honestly, I feel like once work is done, you know, I’m on my phone, I’m checking stuff, whether it’s sports or social media. It’s something that’s become such a big part of what we do in our everyday lives. So Haivision thought it’d be a great idea to create an application so you can use it for your remote production use cases and other case studies in broadcasting.

There you guys have the QR code. If you haven’t seen it before, you can actually download the Haivision Play Pro app, scan in that. Right now, it’s available for the App Store in iOS, and Android is actually coming soon. And yeah, I think this is a good opportunity to kind of ask you, Sebastian, what’s the benefits you see of Play Pro app? Or what would be the classic case study you may see using the Play Pro app?

Well, first of all, hi, everyone. Honestly, I think that Play Pro might be the perfect tool for everyone who uses SRT. Play Pro has a variety of potential use cases. It is free. It is extraordinarily easy to use because it is just a few buttons. And it can help you in many, many cases.

So today, I want to show you just a few of those, first of all where and how you can become a– or how you can consume any SRT stream using Play Pro for monitoring, for return feeds, for whatever your use case is. Second, how you can become actually a source using Play Pro, so that if you have like reporters in the field or occasions where you might not have the full gear in terms of cameras and encoders, you can use Play Pro to become an SRT stream source. And in combination with maybe a stand and a bit of light, this can be a pretty good shot.

And third, the first thing I wanted to show you today is the benefits of using Play Pro in combination with our Haivision Media Platform, because that will bring a lot more features to Play Pro and a really, really cool user experience when using the Media Platform.

So first of all, I’m going to start sharing my screen. And I’m going to start by explaining or showing you the setup I have next to me. So next to me, there is a Makito X4 Encoder, which is encoding an HD source right now.

And it’s streaming to two outputs, actually, one of which is through the Haivision app, which is a bit of the use case we had last week, but I just wanted to reiterate how easy it can be using Hub and Play Pro, and actually consuming an SRT stream. And the other output from my Makito X4 goes to a media platform. Not exactly a media platform, but an SRT Gateway, which is paired with Haivision Media Platform. So I’m going to start by–

Do you mind– do you mind, Sebastian, actually, before we get started, going into detail for our audience a little bit about HMP? Or maybe when you get to that portion in your demonstration for those who don’t know.

Yeah, I’m going to shift this to the part where I show you how to use HMP with Play Pro, but basically HMP– my colleague Alex often refers to HMP as a corporate YouTube, which narrows it down pretty good. So HMP is our Haivision Media Platform, which is intended to distribute video content across your company at scale, meaning that, if you have different campuses, if you have different network topologies in your company, if you have different types of network performances, HMP can cover this and can distribute live events or VOD events throughout your company network, regardless of the connectivity, basically. There are a lot more benefits to HMP, but this was the nutshell version of it.

So first, I’m going to start with showing you the workflow using Play Pro and Haivision Hub. For those of you who weren’t there last week, this is Haivision Hub. I created a route, which actually provides an input for my Makito X4 encoder, which I already connected to make it a bit more quick. And I created a Play Pro output right here.

I’m going to put up the QR code from this output. And now I’m going to have to switch my streaming, my screen sharing, actually. And cool stuff, you should see my iPhone right now. So I’m going to open my camera. And what you can see is that it automatically brings up Play Pro and starts actually streaming the content directly from Haivision Hub. So this is–

I like that you included the video of Slavia Praha, because that’s actually where part of my family is from.

Yeah, I knew that. That’s why I brought it up. I went up late at night to record it. No, actually this is demo footage.

Especially us winning 1-0, which is, against a team like Inter, you never see that. So I’m glad you put in this also of us winning the game.

Yeah, so you can see that it can’t be easier than that, right? So using this QR code in the Haivision Hub and scanning it, opening Play Pro, and boom, you have a stream. I just figured out that Zoom does not support showing the statistics, but I can show you that, if you swipe up with your two fingers on the Play Pro app while you have a stream running, I think you can see this right now, which will show you the statistics of Play Pro, of your streaming session, which is pretty useful if you’re in the field or also if you’re running a Gateway or Hub and people are maybe complaining about the quality of your stream or that it’s shuttering or breaking or whatever. You can easily double check using Play Pro. And yeah, that’s pretty easy, pretty straightforward.

So that was the first thing I wanted to show you with regards to Play Pro. So now we’re going to stop this, and I’m going to go back to my browser in Play Pro. Actually, what I mentioned earlier, you can also become a sender using Play Pro. So for this, I’m going to create a local lineup, which I’m going to call my sender.

Give it a logo, give it a name, boom, we’re done. And I’m going to edit the service from this local lineup and add a stream. Let’s call it stream one. I’m not going to go into descriptions. I know you can choose the function you want to have. So is it play, which we just saw, playback an SRT source or actually stream an SRT source?

You can configure your bitrate. I’m going to leave this to the default, but basically, it gives you everything that your mobile device is capable of doing. So this is an iPhone 11, which is pretty stuffed with good cameras. So you can go up to UHD in here.

You can configure frame rate. You can even configure the codec again, based on your mobile device. And you can select the protocol you want to stream on. So I’m going to use SRT. I’m

going to use a callout to one of my demo Gateways I have around. And I’m going to put in the URL up here. So let’s do this.

Add a port… I think it was this one, if I’m not mistaken. I’m not going to encrypt it, but you can also use encryption with that. Set the latency. 100 milliseconds should be fine from my host to this Gateway. Going to save it, hit Done, and go back to my service browser. And OK, this is my very messy desk right here. And I’m going to show you the stream from Slavia Praha again, hit Stream. And now I’m going to switch back to my– how we can do this?

So now you can also see the statistics right here. You see that I’m connected, I’m streaming. And if I go back to my browser where the gateway is up and running. You can see that I started a stream just with my regular iPhone from my house to the gateway, which is located in the cloud.

And I can do different destinations, although I think most of you might be familiar with how an SRT Gateway works. So I can use this as a source and do many things with this stream. And it took us like, what, two minutes to create the source? That’s a pretty, pretty useful tool. Again, if you have a camera stand and a bit of light behind it, you can shoot some pretty nice and decent clips with it.

So maybe two sentences about the latency for that. Because, obviously, as my iPhone is not a Makito Encoder, latency of the encoding is higher than we are used to through the Makitos. But still, depending on your mobile device and on the codec you use, the bitrate you use, the frame rate you use, you can bring it down to a very usable amount of milliseconds or seconds. And it could still be a very good and valid source for your field operations.

Nice. And actually, I want to pull a question, because I saw a question popped up from the audience here. We mentioned that this is most beneficial for broadcasters. So in terms of case studies, would this be most beneficial for remote production?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Depending on the scenarios?

Yeah, of course, I mean, it pretty much depends on the scenarios. But for remote production, and specifically in remote production for return fees, Play Pro and Play, which is the current version for Android, has proven to be very useful because it is– and that’s the question that just popped up in Q&A, as I’ve seen– it is free, actually. You can just go ahead to your app store. You can download it.

As Jose said at the very beginning, Play Pro is available for iOS right now. It will be available for Android very soon. But still, for Android, we have the Haivision Play, which brings a, let’s say, similar feature set with less nice-looking UI. But Play Pro will be there I think in a couple of weeks. And it is free of charge. Just go to your favorite app store and download it and use it.

And yeah, I mean, if you imagine for a return key, for instance, where you have an iPad, you attach this iPad to some part of your production environment, you just pull the screen, you see

the return. That’s super useful. Also, we have seen customers and use cases where they– so imagine a customer from, let’s say, the broadcast domain using SRT Gateway to distribute channels to a larger scale, to a larger group of service providers, for instance.

We have seen customers that used kind of a multi-viewer solution attached to this gateway, and they were using actually Play Pro to view this multi-viewer. I mean, it’s the smartest way to see what’s going on on your SRT Gateway in almost real time with a good quality of picture. And also, you need to see that you see the physically same streams that you would send out to another location. So that’s pretty useful, too.

There is a question again from the audience.

Yeah, here, I’ll read it out loud for the people in the audience. Is there an option to do remote interviews, connecting the interviewed person’s video from a desktop and the return video using the Gateway?

There is. There are actually plenty of options. One use case we have seen here in Germany with one of our customers is that they did a kind of a talk show, where they had two iPads per host. One was the broadcast signal, one was filming the host. And with this constellation, they had a pretty solid conversation between hosts that were not physically in the same place. So there are definitely plenty of ways. Play Pro might be the easiest one, or the easiest option because it is straightforward to use, and you can use nearly every device for that. So, yeah. Quick answer, yes.

But I feel like every time you come on, you kind of get the more difficult and detailed questions.

So the third thing I wanted to show you is how to pair Play Pro with Haivision Media Platform, and how to leverage the feature set HaiTide Media Platform can deliver on Play Pro. So I have a platform. Jose will be happy again because it’s Slavia Praha winning 1-0.

This is a Haivision Media Platform that I just set up for this demo, so it’s fairly empty. There is only one source, which is, again, my Makito X4. This is paired with the Gateway that we have seen before. In this media platform, I have a library of one source, as I mentioned, and a few video clips that I just imported file-based into this Media Platform that are now available for catch-up.

Also, there is a setup box connected, which is standing right next to me, which is also pulling streams from the media platform. So it’s a kind of a low-profile demo, let’s say. So if I’ll now go ahead and open my Play Pro app again, and of course share it with you guys.

I will navigate back, and I will go back to the Add or Modify section. And then you can see the point Haivision Media Platform, which you can add as a service, which is not– it’s not specifically the right phrasing, I guess, because it is more– it is not adding Media Platform as a service, it is, in fact, pairing your Play Pro app with this Media Platform.

So I’m going in here and typing just the URL of this demo. I don’t like that. And you have to type it correctly. Otherwise, it’s not working.

I was about to say, you have a really good memory if you can just pull that, pick that out of your brain and type it in, but right then–

Yeah.

I use it quite a lot, so. And going back, and now you can see that I have– actually, that’s a bit odd. I should have given it another nickname, but I have two Haivision Media Platforms now. This one is the new one. So the first thing is I have to sign in right now. Sorry.

So now you can see that it automatically paired with Media Platform. And you can see that I have all the sources that we have seen before in the Media Platform available here right now. So I have those three videos. I have one session, which I created earlier. I have this live channel, which is, in fact, the Makito X4 source. So I can pull the same stream again, like I used to pull before.

I can also see the statistics in here. It’s the same– basically, it’s the same process as before, where I was pulling an SRT stream from Haivision Hub. Now, I’m pulling the same SRT stream from the Gateway, which is paired with the Media Platform. So from a technical perspective, or from a technical standpoint, it is the same. It’s the same performance, it’s the same latency.

But from a user experience perspective, this one is pretty decent. So if you imagine a fully packed media platform with a lot of sessions, a lot of videos, a lot of categories of videos, you can have this nice look and feel. It’s easy to use. You can browse it. So I can go ahead and say “Big” and I’m getting Big Buck Bunny.

I can stream it right from the Gateway, again. I see it’s the same information. What we see here is that it is HLS. That’s a bit annoying in the sound. So the Media Platform is not limited to delivering SRT streams. It can also deliver HLS streams, for instance. And Play Pro is perfectly leveraged in this user experience –.

So you really– you actually take the question right out of my mouth, because I was going to ask you what protocols does the Play Pro app support.

Yeah, Play Pro does natively support SRT, obviously, HLS, and UDP. So if you’re in a local domain, you can also consume UDP streams using Play Pro. Those are the three types that you can do with it.

Nice. I mean–

And I fear that’s already the end of my live session, because it’s so easy to use that I ended up way ahead of time.

I mean, that’s the good thing. We tend to keep these around 30 minutes, and if we’re doing a lot of demo and we can keep it shorter, it emphasizes to the audience how easy it really is to set up. And it’s really good to see the different use cases.

You know, last week we saw how you can integrate with the Haivision Hub, and this week, we’re seeing how you can do it with HMP. So it’s good to show our audience the variety that the Play Pro app can offer. And yeah, if you don’t mind, I’m going to steal this screen, then, back from you.

And actually, another question just popped up here. How can you quickly switch between multiple live streams?

That’s a pretty good question. So what you could do is– if I go back– you still see my screen, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

So if I go to this, I don’t know, let’s say I create a new local lineup, multi-channel. And I’m going to throw in the added service, and I’m going to add, let’s say, service one. I’m going to add just something. Doesn’t need to work right now. And then I’m going to add– so it is true. My fingers are too big. I can– so I’m done. Go back and in here…

So I can create lineups that have multiple channels in them. This is– I think it is not limited. At least, I didn’t exceed the limit yet. And you can just go in this one. OK, I don’t want to see this one anymore. I go in this one, and so on and so forth. That’s the easiest way to switch between channels in here.

Also, what you can do is, if I go to Add or Modify and I hit this multichannel thing, you can export this lineup. That means– I don’t want to encrypt it– you can create an array of– you can send this file to anyone using, I don’t know, your favorite communication tool, and anyone with the Play Pro app can import this lineup and will see exactly the same channel list, and can switch and navigate through the same list of channels.

So if you think about maybe a company, for instance, that runs a specific channel lineup, and you want to monitor it, and you have five people that are supposed to monitor it, you create this lineup once, and then you share it between those people and they don’t need to create it, like, five or six times.

–based on these questions, I feel like people might have joined our dry run or something, because they’re kind of asking you as you’re answering them on the spot, because the last question we just had here is, is it possible to share a link to the stream to other person, literally asking that as you’re going through it.

Yeah, because it’s– I mean, it goes hand in hand, right? It’s the same workflow, it’s the same thing. Another thing that I want to show you, if we have like one minute left–

Yeah, go ahead.

–so I’m just going to share this thing right here– is the Haivision Pro Playmaker. So for those of the users that are not willing or capable of using the small buttons in your mobile phone, you can

also use this Playmaker to create a prepared QR code or link, which will start the Play Pro app like we have seen it in the Haivision Hub. So if I’m going to create a stream or play, actually I’m going to do the same that I used to do before, like this and like that, um 2000 blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah.

And then now I’m going to– we could switch again. You can either copy the link right here, which will– if you send it via email or chat or whatever, and if you hit on it on a mobile phone, it will automatically start the Play Pro app with those settings, or you will have this QR code, which is the same as we have seen in Haivision Hub, so if I now go ahead and– it’s a lot of sharing back and forth–

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Yeah, it’s working pretty well. I’m surprised. And open the app again, then I’m back to the streaming thing, and I can start my stream as I started it right before. And it’s exactly the same. It’s an easy-to-use tool, and it will– I mean, this helps a lot when you want to distribute streaming configurations or playback configurations to a larger audience.

Nice. And a question actually is did you clean your desk at all before this, or is your desk always kind of tidied up like that?

That’s the million-dollar question, right? I have so much stuff to do, and that’s why my desk is so messy. That is my answer.

Nice. So yeah, I think that’s all for today, Sebastian, right? You don’t have anything else that you wanted to–

No.

–demonstrate in front of the audience? Cool. Well–

Unless someone is raising a question again, which I don’t see any right now, but.

You never know, really, with this audience. They tend to ask questions as I’m trying to close things out. I guess they like hearing our conversations and they don’t want to get back to work.

Yeah. , No that’s it from my side.

Perfect. Well, I’m actually going to take the screen right from you again and go back to the PowerPoint and close things out here. So let me see.

So yeah, guys, here’s Sebastian’s contact information in case you want to reach out to him, whether it’s more on the Play Pro app or Haivision Hub or HMP. You have his email right here.

Or advice how to clean your desk.

Exactly. If you want to keep a tidy desk, you can also reach out to him for that. He’s more than welcome to help. And his email you have right there, which is [email protected]. And let me see here. So yeah, this is the spotlight. The spotlight, of course, I’m going to do again on the Play Pro app.

The reason we wanted to bring the attention to you guys was because Haivision actually won the 2020 Project of the Year at the NAB show. And we’re very proud, orgullosos, as we would say in Spanish. So if you want to read on how we got nominated, how we won, and more information on why we won, please go to haivision.com, and you can access that and the blog and white paper we actually wrote on that.

And yeah, I think that’s it. Today, for once, I can say it’s short and sweet. Usually, we go over time, and I think now this might be one of the few times that we’re going to end right at the 30-minute mark, which is good, in a sense. People have to get back to work, unfortunately. In terms of future themes, I always say this, if you ever want to come on and speak, we’ve had multiple guest speakers come on before. I think a majority of our HaiTides have guest speakers, more than speakers ourselves from our team.

So you’re more than welcome to either reach out to myself or Peter. You have our emails right here. And yeah, thank you, Sebastian, for joining us again this week. Hopefully we’ll have you back sometime. And thank you, everyone, for joining us this Wednesday. Have a good rest of the week, and hopefully we’ll have you back next week. Take care, guys. Bye, Sebastian.

Thank you guys. Bye bye.