Bonded Wi-Fi Routers, Starlinks, and iPhones Powered MrBeast & Kai Cenat’s Off-Grid Live Stream

Alex Gizis: I hear you have a crazy story about how the Miri router actually got tested.

RyanB: Yeah, so, ironically enough, here's the thing. The very first influencer, who got ahold of this unit. They had seen it at VidSummit, the prototype form. They got themselves into kind of a pickle where they had built a set remotely in the middle of a field because they were going to mock up a building and fill it with fireworks and light this thing off. But nobody checked the internet connectivity of this live stream. And it was advertised to happen just 48 hours later.

Alex Gizis: With fireworks. And we're going to set it off. That could be as many as... ONE people.

RyanB: You're right. And it would be the largest YouTube personality out there. So we received a call from MrBeast's team that they had a joint livestream with Kai Cenat over the 4th of July holiday. And they wanted to mock, they were burning down Kai Cenat's house with fireworks.

RyanB: Apparently that's an ongoing thing on his live streams. And so when they got out there, they realized it had no data connectivity. They didn't know what to do. So they reached out to us and we literally packed up the two routers in the US that we had and drove down there. And the setup is basically this: we had two Starlinks; we had both modems, the 4G and the 5G; we had two hotspots connected over Ethernet; we then had phones paired on the front. We were utilizing another phone for Pair & Share. So across all of this, it had to be that it was the same streaming setup. Like, so they replicated everything that is in Kai Cenat's house down to like the tape on the chairs.

But that also meant that they were streaming over OBS. There was no bonding of video encoders because it had to be as if it was in his home without all of like, completely duplicated his home. A hundred percent. And so that live stream went on and we streamed 1080p, 60 frames a second and not a single packet lost with the unit.

And for somebody you look at it and you're like, okay, for the first time out of the gate, like, let's like do this slow ramp up. But when they're talking about breaking the internet, and in fact, Twitch comments started breaking because it was just so insane. I think they gave away like a hundred plus thousand dollars that night online. And so all the Twitch were just going nuts and the entire thing was powered by the Miri router.

Alex Gizis: That's right. It wasn't just the video streaming out. All the people entering the contest, posting the comments to get a chance to win. All that was coming in through. All of that was coming back in to announce the winners.

RyanB: Correct. And we had teams monitoring the stream inside of the RVs to make sure everything was right. So it wasn't just a stream from the computer headed up for his normal Twitch channel, but it's all the other ancillary things. So, yeah, I mean, it was super exciting and we knew the router in that current form was performing really fantastic for us. At that point, it was final design. I think we all were kind of like, yeah, we got this. It was just that the validation that we did this on a stream that could not fail because they had built a home. They had stuffed it full of. Tens of thousands of dollars of firewall.

Alex Gizis: Oh, wait, the lens cap was on, do it again.

RyanB: When that house burns down, it's burns down.

Alex Gizis: This is one of the weird, craziest points. What was the live streaming hardware and software and what happened to it?

RyanB: So we're in the stream. Things are running smoothly, and all of our teams, obviously, everyone's on board for this.

We're all monitoring every packet that's going across. We're analyzing anything that could potentially falter. We start to see one of the main Starlinks drop and the others pick up, which is exactly what is supposed to happen, but you hate to see it. You get a small pop of the Starlink.

Alex Gizis: One of those satellites just went out, right?

RyanB: Correct. And it was the main Starlink unit. So it's the one that had the most bandwidth. And there's a guy drinking a Pepsi, watching the whole thing happen, standing right in front of the Starlink. Those are the type of things that like, we're in the middle of a field. So we didn't think we needed to put up cones around the production RV, but that's exactly it.

So the teams told him to move away from the Starlink, and then you see it recover and everything else just happened. Everything else kind of weaned itself back off, but you know, look, coming out of the gate from that left us kind of on a high and just really anticipating this fall launch of this product because we know what it can do and the benefit of having this router is for production companies.

Alex Gizis: So the other bit you mentioned to me at the time was that the streaming, there was a windows PC running OBS. So, we're in the room with the cameras filming the talent and the fireworks. And when the fireworks went off, that PC was destroyed.

RyanB: Yeah, so the network that we built out was basically the Miri router, sitting in the RV. That went into just a standard Netgear AV switch. And then we ran an Ethernet cable over to the building, you know, 300 feet away because setback for the fire marshal wanted us to be far away. And quite frankly, I don't think they wanted to burn the paint up on the RV that was sitting there either.

So we ran that just like a normal network would be at your home or office, right? The only other thing we added is we added a wireless access point because then we realized that to replicate the set, the RGB lights in the room needed a Wi-Fi connection for them to work. So we quickly threw one, a hotspot just outside, but it was literally just an Ethernet cable into the back of the PC running OBS.

And that's how the setup was. And we weren't involved in a spec of how they built any of that. They basically just said, "Hey guys, here's the PC. It needs data. It's going to stream over OBS There are no other options. That's what we stream at. And it cannot be any different than all of our other shows."

So, that's what we did.

Alex Gizis: That's awesome. That's an awesome victory. So it was nowhere near the fireworks, huh?

RyanB: No, but I did save a piece of the wire. So I was hoping that the access point wouldn't burn up like totally and I could like hang that on my wall. But I did, I was able to get a piece of the Ethernet cable with like the burnt end on it and I cut myself a small strand of that Ethernet cable and that forever is going to like be the wire that went into the building that simulated the house burning down, which, you know, set the internet a storm. The press media that thought that Kai Cenat's house burnt down. I mean, I think the stories were, ended up being crazy, like people were calling the fire department in Georgia to report...

Alex Gizis: I was watching from home, and so I had the comments up and I was watching, and some people spotted immediately. They said, wait a minute. Kai's ceiling is clean. He's never cleaned his ceiling before. It just gets slowly dirtier and dirtier. It's clean. Is this really his house?

RyanB: There was a bunch of pixel peepers, looking in there and analyzing like every tape mark or tear on the chair. And so there was some people that like...

Alex Gizis: The golden red chair in the back had one less button on the, on the plush section. And people put up the two photos side by side.

RyanB: Here's the thing now. You know how they could tell that that button was wrong? Because we were streaming it in 1080p60fps. That's the thing, right?

Alex Gizis: It was your fault. You did too good a job.

RyanB: Well, but inherently too, if there were internet problems, if there was buffering, that's also not Kai Cenat set either, right? He doesn't have those issues at home because he's likely on, like, dedicated fiber, like, you know, he's got that set up.

Alex Gizis: I'm sure he's got his house fixed.

RyanB: So the whole point of this thing, the realistic nature of it was, there could be nothing different and that was also the internet as well. And we were doing this in the middle of a remote field in North Carolina.

Alex Gizis: That is so awesome.

RyanB: Yeah. It was a lot of fun.