Live X: High-quality Audio and Video for the World’s Leading Events

The Challenge

For years, Live X’s New York City headquarters ran on a network based on 1G dedicated internet service with failover provided by a 1G business-grade connection. This worked well for their master control facility, but their dedicated internet service was also running public IPs for communications, encoding, and transmission gear. During a major event, internet service went down, causing Live X to lose their public IPs. While failover saved the broadcast, communications dropped, adding a lot of stress to the production. Behnke knew he never wanted to deal with that again.

Thanks to his long-time partnership with the event connectivity experts at Castle Point Technologies (a FrontierUS partner), he knew exactly who could help.

Castle Point Technologies
and the Castle Case

For years, Live X had been working with Castle Point to rent Peplink devices—typically MBX Pro and SDX cellular SD-WAN routers—on a per-event basis. In particular, they’d grown very fond of Castle Point’s Castle Case “internet-in-a-box” product, a complete Peplink-based cellular and WiFi solution built into a rugged, portable case. Looking for a permanent enterprise solution that could offer the same power and reliability, Behnke reached out to Castle Point’s Ryan Trzcinski.

The Solution

Castle Point deployed two SDX Pro routers to each branch location, running on high availability with at least two fiber ISPs each. Castle Point also added two SDX Pros running diverse ISPs to their own datacenter to function as a SpeedFusion hub. Each SDX Pro is equipped with a FlexModule to provide cellular hot failover. Some remote employees were given Peplink UBR LTE routers to use from home.

Now, Live X’s branch locations run SpeedFusion tunnels to their hub. This has allowed Live X to offload their public IPs to a much stronger location, minimizing the possibility of disruption. In addition, it enables all the benefits of SpeedFusion, including WAN smoothing for hypercritical processes and hot failover provided by the SDX Pros. This active redundancy means the Live X team doesn’t even notice if something goes down. Connectivity is guaranteed, quality is ensured, and communications will never drop.

Live X reports 100% uptime since the new network was deployed.

Endless Possibilities

The benefits of Live X’s new Peplink-based infrastructure don’t end with simple uptime. Live X has been producing broadcasts remotely for years—well before “virtual” and “hybrid” were everyday terms—but their new infrastructure allows for brand-new possibilities

“Corey will ask, ‘Can we do this?’” said Trzcinski. “The answer is almost always, ‘Yes.’”

One exciting capability was tested at the 2021 New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. Utilizing Virtual Video Control Room, a cloud-based product they developed, Live X was able to manage and produce the entire NYE 2021 production remotely, leaving a very small footprint at the actual event site. The innovative approach was powered by a Castle Point-provided Peplink Balance SDX modular router in a mobile unit to capture interviews with revellers. The videos were stored in network-attached storage connected to the internet, allowing playback from anywhere.

Finally, due to the ongoing partnership with Castle Point Technologies, it’s simple for Live X to send Castle Cases to clients to immediately establish Peplink-powered connectivity anywhere it’s needed. 

If you’d like a system like this for your broadcast or mission critical workflow, contact Ryan with Castle Point Technologies at ryan@castlepoint.tech.