How Much Data Should You Allocate to IRL Streaming
Cellular data bills climb fast when every minute of broadcast pushes video out of your phone plan: a single hour of IRL streaming uses roughly 1 to 3 GB, and many streamers pay for two or three plans at once. Data usage here just means how many gigabytes your stream spends.
Speedify is an app that runs your upload over Wi-Fi, 4G/5G cellular, Ethernet and Starlink together, and Speedify can lean on free Wi-Fi first so cellular allowances last longer. Speedify needs two or more internet connections to keep the stream live when one drops; on a single connection it works as an encrypted VPN and cannot stop that connection from dropping. Ahead: how much data an IRL stream really needs at different quality settings, and the Speedify settings that shift traffic off your cellular plans.
IRL Streaming Data Usage and Issues
When IRL streaming, you have to take three things into account:
- Bitrate
- Framerate
- Resolution
All of these factors will affect the quality of your video, how much processing power it takes to encode your video, and how much bandwidth it takes to broadcast your video. It is always better to have a steady stream with a slightly lower resolution or framerate than it is to have a super high-quality stream that is constantly buffering.
Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook Live each publish their own recommended bitrates. The ranges below are typical values for live streaming without buffering, not any one platform’s figures:
- Full HD Video with a High Framerate (1080p, 60fps) > your bitrate should be 4,500 to 6,000 kbps
- Full HD with a standard Framerate (1080p, 30fps) > your bitrate should be 3,500 to 5,000 kbps
- Regular HD with High Framerate (720p, 60fps) > your bitrate should be 3,500 to 5,000 kbps
- Regular HD with Standard Framerate (720p, 30fps) > your bitrate should be 2,500 to 4,000 kbps
So, to calculate the monthly data usage, just multiply the bitrates above with the number of seconds you will stream per day and the number of days you’ll stream in a month. Let’s take an example:
- you wish to stream 720p @ 30 fps for one hour daily on weekends
- that’s 3600 seconds x roughly 9 days per month
- the total amount of monthly data usage for a 2,500 kbps IRL stream would be around 10 GB
Connection Problems That Interrupt IRL Streams
Almost every streamer runs into unreliable Internet at some point, and it’s most annoying when you’re streaming live to your followers.
These are the most common situations where live streams run into connection problems:
- When traveling or on the go: on the street, a bus or a train. You may be connected to a bad or spotty Wi-Fi hotspot.
- In crowded areas: the available bandwidth on both Wi-Fi and cellular connections may not be enough to serve everyone at a stadium, a concert or a frat house party.
- At home: your ISP may be doing maintenance work right when you’re broadcasting live, or throttling your connection.
Here’s what happens: if the connection is unreliable, you may not be able to stream at a high resolution because bandwidth is limited, so your videos may appear jittery or choppy. And if your connection is spotty and disconnects, you lose many of your viewers, at least for that stream.
Combine Cellular Connections for IRL Streaming with Speedify
Speedify fits in an IRL streaming backpack without adding hardware. Speedify is a software app that lets you use multiple internet connections at the same time for faster, more reliable and secure internet, and Speedify runs on computers, smartphones, tablets and Linux devices, including Raspberry Pi.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money on dedicated hardware for combining connections to use several cellular connections at once. Speedify does it in software on your phone or computer: you can combine any mix of two or more Wi-Fi networks, cellular networks and wired networks. Combining them adds an automatic internet failover mechanism for reliability and gives the stream more upload bandwidth. In Redundant Mode, Speedify sends each packet over every connection and uses the copy that arrives first, so latency (ping) follows whichever connection is faster at that moment.
To use 2 or more internet connections at once, Speedify relies on its technology for combining internet connections: your traffic is split packet by packet across all of them.
If one of your connections fails, Speedify automatically reroutes all the traffic through your other available connection(s). This happens in the background without you having to do anything. When the dropped connection is back online, Speedify will pick it up and start using it again.
How to Optimize IRL Stream Data Usage with Speedify
The great thing about Speedify is that you can configure each connection you’re using individually and set priority rules. This means that you can:
- set data limits per connection
- configure when a specific connection should be used
- set a rate limit on a connection, so a metered cellular plan carries less of the stream.
Read more about connection settings in Speedify’s knowledge base.
Keep IRL Streaming Data Usage in Check with Speedify
Speedify doesn’t just get you a fast and reliable internet connection when live streaming in real life. Speedify also protects you from compromised Wi-Fi networks and snooping hackers, and uses encryption to keep your private data under your control.
Before Speedify, users often had to choose between security and speed. With two or more internet connections, the combined speed usually makes up for the cost of encryption. You can have both. On a single connection, Speedify can be a little slower, like any VPN.
Cut down on low quality video, buffering and dropped streams when IRL live streaming: carry two internet connections and let Speedify combine them. Get started with Speedify today!
Speedify
Get started with Speedify today.
Speedify combines Wi-Fi, 4G/5G cellular, Ethernet, Starlink and satellite into one faster, more reliable internet connection. Free to try: 5 GB a month with a free account. No credit card required.
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