LiveU Competitors: Best Bonding Service for Live Streaming

Are you live streaming online? It’s a great way to create content, get known all over the world, plus a lot of fun. However, it can be expensive to get the necessary equipment to keep a stable live stream going while you’re out and about.

First thing that comes into mind when taking about live streaming gear is the LiveU Solo device. That has proven its reliability for many streamers so far. But the price tag starts somewhere at around $1,600.

Then, you start looking at the LiveU competitors. Which are, more or less, within the same concept – a hardware box you need to power and connect to the Internet. They also have a similar price range.

The main feature that helps live streamers using the LiveU or its competitors is the bonding part – using all of your Internet connections at the same time. Here at Speedify, we managed to put together a competitor to the LiveU for only about $600 – and that includes the video camera as well! Watch the video below and read to see how it’s done.

First – for the “computer” core of the streaming gear, you should make sure it can combine multiple connections at once. Look for channel bonding or link aggregations.

In our example, we installed Speedify on a Raspberry Pi 4. With Speedify, we have the only VPN capable of software channel bonding, so we were able to incorporate the bonding part of the technology right off the bat.

Then, there are 3 main processes you have to get working:

1. Getting video from the camera into the main streaming device. 
2. Turning that raw live video footage into a streamable format. 
3. Broadcasting it over the Internet using channel bonding technology. You also have to make sure you can control the stream without a user interface.

As mentioned before, one of the core elements of this live streaming gear is the Speedify channel bonding VPN. You can easily set up Speedify on any Windows, macOS, iOS, Android or Linux device. For Raspberry Pi use the instructions here.

Along with that, on our Pi setup we’re using ffmpeg, which is a fast, lightweight, very configurable open-source software suite available on Linux for video and audio encoding and decoding.  We installed ffmpeg by following these compilation steps https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Ubuntu. We installed every third party library listed except for libaom, since it is unstable and not necessary for our setup. 

And then – depending on the operating system your main device uses – you can install various software like OBS, etc.

We also needed to set up the Circuit Playground Express to work as a remote to control the stream. This involved writing a couple of Python scripts so that one button starts the live stream, one button stops it, and the switch reboots the Pi if needed. We have our code to set up the streaming buttons available on Github with more detailed setup instructions here: https://github.com/speedify/rpi-streaming-experiment.