To ensure the best experience for your viewers, you need a sufficient internet connection speed that will provide a persistent data transmission to the Livescale platform.
We can split internet connection in 3 types, from worst to best-case scenario:
- Public internet access: if you're uploading your live video stream through a public internet access, such as airport WiFi, public Wifi (cities WiFi, shops WiFi, coffee place WiFi, venue WiFi, ...) or any public unknown connection, be careful as the bandwidth of your internet connection may vary a lot, and so your live video upload may be corrupted from time to time.
- Private mobile connection: if you use your Smartphone (by using an app that upload your live video stream, or by sharing your network with your computer), you may have a good bandwidth (especially in 4G/LTE), but you must not move from the optimal position you found (in terms of data connection) to avoid troubles in bandwidth variations.
- Private fixed connection: the best scenario, as the variation of bandwidth should be very limited. However, depending of the kind of connection (i.e. office connection), the maximum bandwidth might be lower than 4G/LTE, especially in Africa or India.
Did you know? Livescale provides a huge advantage for live video producers: instead of pushing n times your live video feeds to n social networks, you only have to upload 1 live video feed for all your social networks, as well as desktop/mobile users. So you can make huge savings on your Internet's connection requirement!
Checking your internet connection
To check your internet connection, the first step is to perform a connection test with a tool like www.speedtest.net, available both on web and as a mobile app. We recommend doing two connections tests within a window of 2 minutes. The most important value of those tests will be the "upload speed", as you will upload your live video stream.
To avoid any risk of "choking" videos or poor video quality, we recommend you have an "upload speed" value of two times the bitrate of your video stream to upload. In other words:
- For an HD live video (2.5 Mb/s recommended), you should have a 5Mb/s upload speed.
- For an FullHD live video (5 Mb/s recommended), you should have a 10Mb/s upload speed.
- For an UltraHD live video (20 Mb/s recommended), you should have a 40 Mb/s upload speed.
Of course, those are only recommendations. If you have a trusted internet connection, 25-30% overhaul bandwidth should be sufficient. If you want to provide a FullHD live video but with a limited bandwidth, you can also lower your encoding value to 4Mb/s.
If you have troubles with your internet connection during a live video upload, your webcast software/app may warn you with an alert pop-up or at least by telling you the number of frames of the video that were not delivered (on a 30 frame/second base).