hey everybody it’s lon seidman we’ve got another production device to take a look at today this is the teradek wave and this looks like a display that you might attach to a camera when you’re out in the field and it will work like that but it is really a video encoder that will allow you to take whatever is coming into this thing and transmit it out to popular streaming services or just a regular rtmp connection and this also works with the teradek share link cloud service that will allow you to bond multiple internet connections to the display and transmit out to multiple services simultaneously and i’ll show you exactly what that looks like here in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this is on loan from teradek so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this monitor and encoder is all about now the price point on this is about twelve hundred dollars it is rather pricey and i think for a lot of people who are satisfied using obs or some other software solution there’s probably no need to buy something like this but if you’re doing a lot of field production where you need reliability and something
that you know is going to work when you plug something into it that’s where you look at a hardware device to do the streaming for you and at this price it’s actually more on the lower end of the price spectrum for production hardware now this works a lot like the teradek vdu devices that we’ve looked at previously but this does integrate a display for showing what is coming into it in addition to that it’s a touch display so you can actually navigate all of its features without having to use a computer or an app that those other boxes usually require for the best results but here you can do most of what you will do with this device just interacting directly with its screen it is a 1080p display it can go up to a thousand nits of brightness so it is super bright it looks great it’s a really high quality display the color is really nice on it the encoder inside is an h.264 encoder and it will do up to 1080p at 60 frames per second for streaming out now the build quality on this feels very solid it weighs about a pound and a half or 680 grams it’s a mixture of abs plastic and aluminum it feels like a brick which is what you want for a field production device like this it’s got gorilla glass here on the front but they also have a screen protector that you can apply to it as well so i think it’ll hold up pretty well when you are out in the
field now you’ve got two options for power one is here on the bottom it’s got a usb type-c connector the power supply it comes with is a 30 watt power supply so if you do intend to use a usbc battery with it you’ll want one that can deliver at least 12 watts but i would look for something that can do 20 or 30 just to be safe the reason is is that it has usb ports here on the bottom and top that supports cellular modems and those are going to draw a little bit more power out of it and the 30 watt power supply here of course is enough for that now in addition to the usbc power you also have the option of using sony l series batteries here on the back and you can hot swap the batteries for continuous power i don’t believe this will charge the batteries though when they’re connected to it so you’ll want to charge them on a separate charger and then pop them in as you go so you do have some flexibility on power with this thing there’s a bunch of ports on this primarily because you have so many different options for streaming with this device so next to the usb port here we have gigabit ethernet we have that usb connector we talked about earlier this is a tripod mount so you can mount it on top of something like a camera or some other type of rig this is your hdmi input here and this of course is what it will use to put an image
on your display but also stream out to the internet next to that you’ve got an analog audio input and they allow you to mix the hdmi audio with the analog audio coming in and you can do that just by tapping on the audio here going to mix and adjusting each source’s volume here on screen additionally they have a headphone jack so you can monitor the audio going out to your stream and then on the top here we’ve got another usb port and then you have an sd card slot here because you can also record the outgoing stream locally to the card so you have a safe copy should your stream go out mid stream or whatever you’ve got the ability to upload the full recording later now you have a lot of connectivity options with this device to get it onto the internet for streaming so of course here at the bottom you saw that gigabit ethernet port you have the usb ports here at the bottom and top of the device that can support two different cellular connections and then of course you’ve got these antennas at the top which are for its built-in wi-fi connection and the wi-fi supports wi-fi six so you can get the latest and greatest wi-fi connectivity going on here now if you are not using the share link service it will only stream out from one of these connections at a time but you can set the priority here so it can roll over to a different connection type should one fail so right now i’ve got my wired
connection as the primary followed by the wireless and then the usb modems if i was using them but things get really interesting if you subscribe to their share link service because this will let you connect up to seven connections simultaneously and spread the connection out equally across all seven now the way this works for the full seven is that you would have one connection going into the ethernet two connections going into the usb ports via a cellular modem and then you set up an access point on its wi-fi and connect cell phones to the teradek wave here over wi-fi and then it will send the outgoing video through those four phones along with the ethernet and the two cellular connections going in via usb and it will load balance all of that now to give you an idea as to how this works i have the device right now sending video to the share link cloud and i have two connections here established one is on wi-fi and then i have a separate internet connection coming in over the ethernet and if i tap on the bonding there it’ll give me an indicator as to how it’s splitting up the load so this is a five megabit per second connection and it’s doing about 2.5 megabits uh per uh stream here and if i jump over to the share link control panel you can get a better sense as to how that works now what’s interesting though is that if i were to pull the ethernet out of here it will automatically switch all of the load over
to the wireless connection without losing any connectivity so you can see that wired connection dropping off and the wi-fi here is picking up the rest of the load and then if i plug the ethernet back in it will rebalance things out and i’ve used this technology on some of the other teradek devices out in the field and it really works quite well it does a very good job of actively managing things and the streams tend to really hold up quite well even when you don’t have a single good connection that you can really rely upon a little bit earlier i did a live stream where i demoed this happening in real time where we pulled the cord out right in the middle of a stream and you can see how seamless that transition is have a look so i’m going to pull out the ethernet when i do that we shouldn’t see any interruption because it is bonding the connection here and if i go on to my device here what will happen is i’m going to see that wired connection drop off and the load switch over to the wireless now in addition to these bonding features you can also transmit through share link to multiple destinations simultaneously so if you’re doing a project for a client and they want to be on youtube facebook and twitch and a few other services you can set them all up in here including rtmp sources and then transmit out from the sharelink cloud to each simultaneously and what’s nice about how this works is that you
only have to send one stream up to share link their cloud is going to distribute it out to the other locations so if you are very much bandwidth constrained even with the bonding you only have to get that one connection up to get it out to every place you want it to go to and i found the pricing on sharelink to be pretty reasonable they have one option where you can pay only when you use the service and they charge you based on the outgoing data to the destinations from the sharelink cloud so the base level here is two dollars per gigabyte again on a per use basis and if you’re streaming out at five megabits per second you’re going to be sending about two gigabytes or so per hour so a couple of bucks per destination and if you’re being paid to do the stream i think it’s a pretty good deal especially given you can send out to multiple destinations with one stream up and you have that connection bonding for better reliability they also have some monthly plans here where you get some data transfer built into that plan along with a lower cost per gigabyte but if you’re like me and only stream occasionally i think the on-demand option here is not a bad deal for what you get now if you don’t want to use share link you can set up a direct connection if you want so if we go over here to stream destinations you can see that i’ve got one of my youtube channels configured here and i can set it to work with youtube facebook vimeo or wowza i also have the option here to add my own custom rtmp feed over here so if you have a service that’s not on that list you can get your rtmp information and send it out directly there in addition to operating with the screen here you can also log
in via their web-based control panel and set up these things on a computer so if you have long strings of text to paste in it’s a little bit easier to use the computer control panel i think versus the touch display here but you have the choice of either one just remember though that this cannot stream out to more than one destination at a time so you will need to connect up with a service provider if you want to do multi-streaming on your own without share link so overall i found this to be another solid offering from teradek and like the other encoders we’ve looked at i think the real value add with these devices is the sharelink cloud layer because that bonding feature is so good and so reliable that it really i think makes a big difference if you’re doing production out in the field and that’s not something you can get as easily with a software-based solution and if you’ve got one of those a10 minis like i have here i like the fact that the wave has the built-in display so you can monitor your audio you can monitor your stream you’ve got everything you need right on this device without having to bring extra stuff with you and i think that does make a big difference especially if you are lugging things out to a remote location if you’ve got your a10 mini a camera and the wave here uh you are good to go uh for your remote live stream that is going to do it for this one until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by thelan.tv supporters including gold level supporters jim tannis and tom albrecht hot sauce and video games and eric’s variety channel brian parker and frank goldman amda brown and matt zagaya and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
