Anybody looked at Louper.io for live-streaming? Looks pretty great for $99 a month.
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Seems to reflect everyone’s XMas wishlist which makes me wonder where the catch is.
At their pricing scheme they must rely on peer to peer traffic routing. What kills everyone else are the cloud egress cost. So unlimited calls in the free tier and generally no monthly time allocation are only possible if most traffic doesn’t go through their servers.
4K video, latency free post sound. Those are tall orders. So I’d be skeptical but never mind being surprised.
Real world experiences and reviews would tell…
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It isn’t color accurate, and I believe will be limited to at the best 10bit 4:2:0 as they are using OBS as their ingest software. Although they never mention colorspace or bit depth, so I am skeptical that even 10bit would is supported. This is exactly how Evercast started. This might actually be a really good alternative to ClearView Flex, if it supports 10bit, which CVF does.
To get around the bandwidth issue, for our in-house streaming service, I’ve rented a bare-metal server from dedicated.com for ~$40/m that provided unlimited bandwidth on a 1gig port. I use their LA data center to have the lowest latency as this is the geographic zone of our endpoints. We are under 2ms from our office to their data center, and our major client.
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I started testing it this week. Demo is free, so nothing to lose. Unfortunately, it’s not color accurate – but I will say in our client viewing environment – what is? Agency folks are using laptops in offices with mixed light and varying degrees of bandwidth. I try to get them to tune up their viewing by turning off “True Tone” etc, then leveling the brightness. But some are using Mac laptops and others are even using Dells 
.
The streamer is LBS. Built from OBS, just setup per Louper’s needs. You can stream 10-bit YUV, but like Alan said, the sampling is probably low (it has no setting to control it). However, when comparing signals from Louper and Streambox Chroma, I see little visual difference. This is of course on an iPad and laptop – not using a calibrated 65" monitor, which Streambox will win on quality. It depends on the scrutiny going into it. Clients seem perfectly happy viewing remotely on a laptop, since the spots will probably be seen in that environment anyway.
The problem with Streambox Chroma for us has been that agency IT departments make it so difficult to make the Media Player available. We spend 15-20 mins just trying to get clients set up before the session. Louper is instant and doesn’t require a parallel Zoom session. The annotation tool is a nice bonus as well. I like that I can control the bit rate. I’ve really been enjoying it, and think I will use it often. I will keep Streambox Chroma in the back pocket when the job requires it.
For the price you get a good product; but not the ideal product.
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StreamBox has the worst UI and client workflow. Those guys are clueless. This what I keep telling all these streaming companies and they don’t listen.
“We have 2 types of clients, those that don’t want to do anything, and those that can’t do anything.”
The service needs to be web based and no install, otherwise it isn’t going to happen.
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Another option that has been popular with colorists during the lockdowns is SetStream: https://setstream.io/
It is browser based on the client side, has the extra features chat/conference that eliminates the separate Zoom call. It’s WebRTC streaming based through AWS servers, so the cost is a bit higher and they have a number of acquisition options from simple to better.
Not 100% sure on 10bit, and didn’t see any spec in the documentation. But given that it’s a go-to for colorist I assume the options exists.
While it is pricier, they have a lot of pay as you go options, so you don’t get locked into a massive subscription if you don’t use it every day. It’s great if you need this just a few times a year.
But would be for video post. Audio post has separate requirements and Source Elements is ahead on that game including plugins for pickup from your DAW.
I know the folks behind it. A small scrappy team, but very knowledgable. Thatcher has worked as colorist and DIT and is a regular on LGG. Not just some generic IT folks trying to make a dime.
We actually use ClearView Flex.
Per Alex from Louper –
Our short to medium term focus is very much on live review-and-approve space. There’s more to be done, such as support for 10-bit / 12-bit, HDR as well as better integration with NLEs.
That’s hopeful, at least!
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