Whenever you’re live streaming online with StreamYard on Twitch or any other platform, you need a fast and reliable Internet connection, especially for uploading. That way, you won’t have any headaches like dropped frames, low video quality and disconnects from the streaming server. 

Unfortunately, this happens much too often, especially when you’re least expecting it. And when that happens:

• you appear unprofessional to your Twitch audience
• you may also lose followers, if this takes place frequently
• the activity you’re streaming will be affected - for example - you can lose progress with the game, people will miss important bits from your speech or interview, etc.

At Speedify we help live content creators from Twitch and other platforms improve their live streams. We wanted to know exactly how much our service helps live streamers, so we put Speedify to the test with StreamYard in order to see how it helps in avoiding connectivity related issues. This article shares the results we got from testing and how you can enhance your StreamYard live streams.

Is your StreamYard live stream experiencing an issue? Is it blurry and/or laggy?

These are just a few of the questions that are popular in the live streaming community. As per this article from StreamYard, a blurry (low video quality) or laggy live stream is caused almost always by the quality of your Internet connection.

What you can do: use wired connections instead of Wi-Fi, contact your ISP, choose another streaming server, restart your network equipment - more in this comprehensive troubleshooting guide.

Broadcasting with StreamYard requires a steady and fast Internet connection so your stream’s video quality doesn’t drop or disconnect. That’s why Internet connectivity is very important. Here at Speedify we get that - our service does everything to help live streaming - from optimizing live streams to making sure you never get offline during a stream.

There are many online reviews and discussions where streamers agree that Speedify helps their live streaming. But we wanted to test it ourselves with StreamYard and see exactly how much it does that. Especially now, when we have the brand new Speedify protocol in place.

Test setup: our goal is to evaluate Twitch streaming improvements with StreamYard when using Speedify vs. not using Speedify. So we ran multiple tests for a 30 minute video.

All tests were conducted via StreamYard on a PC with the following configuration:

Operating system: Windows 10 20H2
CPU: Intel i5-1035G1
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: Intel UHD
Internet connectivity: 

• Wi-Fi hotspot with 30% packet loss; rate limited to 740 Kbps
• Two cellular connections tethered via USB: 3G HSPA+ network with 10 Mbps download / 2 Mbps upload

Video source: 1080p video file
Video resolution: 1080p
Streaming quality: determined automatically by StreamYard
Twitch streaming server: Austria
Speedify server: Vienna (Austria)
StreamYard settings: default

Testing scenarios: we tested with and without Speedify using one or more Internet connections out of the three above.

Takeaways on testing StreamYard with Speedify

• First of all - as a streaming platform, Streamyard is fairly limited, with no control over the stream, other than the resolution. In the background, the platform seems to keep up with the bitrate and fps rate, sacrificing the quality of the video instead. 
• Video quality is clearly better when using Speedify with the bad Wi-Fi network, in comparison with not using Speedify on that.
• When we added the cellular connections to Speedify, the stream quality improved even more.

As expected, Speedify improves the quality of the live stream when using StreamYard. In fact, we are always testing Speedify with live streaming for each new release. We are finding that as the Internet connection has a higher packet loss rate, you can see a higher improvement with Speedify than without it. 

If you need your stream to be steady and not be affected by any Internet variations, make sure you equip yourself with a channel bonding solution like Speedify. Here’s what somebody whose company and job depends on successful live streaming has to say about Speedify: