How To Run A Starlink 24 Hour Live Stream | Speedify LIVE

On the 190th episode of Speedify LIVE our focus is solely on Starlink and our 24/7 Starlink stream on Twitch, as Alex and Ryan discuss why and how we set it all up to learn more about this unique connection type.

We review our elaborate setup that could be even more complicated, while we look back at all the challenges of running a non-stop stream and what we did to overcome them.

Here are our 5 takeaways from our special Starlink-focused stream:

1. After seeing how many Starlink users on Reddit and other forums were using Speedify, we figured: why not try it ourselves? So we got a Starlink RV on the rooftop of the Speedify office in order to learn more and be able to better answer Starlink-related customer questions. 
2. Our Starlink stream setup is just a little bit complicated: we have two 4K PoE video cameras on our roof, streaming 24/7 with OBS on a Windows gaming PC. We’re using chatbots from Streamlabs and StreamElements, both allowing us to change scenes in OBS through chat, with the OBS Remote Parameter Script in the Streamlabs Chatbot that allows custom Python scripts to come into the chatbot to change scenes in OBS through a websocket. We’re also using Restream to send the stream from OBS to Restream servers them to Twitch and YouTube. 
3. Running the 24/7 stream taught us that it’s more important to have the stream stay up than have it be Full HD! Which is why we lowered the resolution from 1080p to 720p to make the stream more stable; while also lowering the bitrate to 1500 kbps; also trying OBS’s dynamic bitrate setting, but since it’s still beta, it didn’t work as planned just yet. 
4. Running the stream, we had disconnection issues for a number of reasons, but we found possible solutions! Using OBS’s Auto-Reconnect feature we set the reconnect delay to the minimum 1s and set the number of attempts to 200; while also using Twitch’s Disconnect Protection when running the stream without Restream just to Twitch.
5. With the Starlink stream running non-stop for months we faced a number of challenges: connectivity issues, stream dropouts from high memory or CPU usage from OBS, as well as OBS UI crashes – but we believe it’s mostly because we have so many moving parts running the stream.