Here’s the gear and software we’re going to use to explore the ancient castle, live in front of an internet audience.
Bran Castle in Transylvania is a stone medieval fortress with walls several feet thick and rooms far out of cell tower range, and on October 28, 2021 the Speedify team broadcast a live guided tour from inside it. Wi-Fi barely reaches in there, and the cellular signal comes and goes room by room.
Speedify is an app that carries a live stream over Wi-Fi, 4G/5G cellular, Ethernet, Starlink and satellite internet connections at once, so when one falls to nothing the others keep the video moving. Speedify needs two or more connections for that; on a single connection it works as an encrypted VPN and cannot stop that connection from dropping. This post lists the gear and streaming software the team carried in, the problems the team expected, and how the broadcast held together using Speedify.
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What the Dracula’s Castle Live Stream Was
Since it was Halloween season, what better way to celebrate than visiting a centuries old vampire’s fortress in the mountains? On Thursday, October 28, 2021, at 11:20 am EDT / 15:20 GMT, the Speedify team went on a private tour of Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania, Romania, and took viewers along through livestreaming. The plan below was written before the stream; the lessons from the day are in the follow-up guide on how to IRL stream from anywhere.
Inside Bran Castle, the small windows make it worse: several rooms were expected to have no usable signal at all.
The Equipment Used to Stream IRL from Dracula’s Castle
The team used a typical IRL setup. The only difference: instead of keeping a second internet connection on standby, the phone used both connections at the same time through Speedify, an app that can combine multiple internet sources into one connection for more stable and secure livestreaming, video calling and web browsing.
Here’s the gear:
- Streaming device: Samsung Galaxy S9 phone running Android 10, connected to the Vodafone Romania network
- Streaming software: Larix Broadcaster on the phone, streaming via RTMP
- Streaming platform in the cloud: Restream
- Connectivity:
- a cellular connection from Vodafone Romania on the streaming device,
- a cellular connection from Orange Romania via Wi-Fi tethering from a Nokia 8110 4G phone.
- Software that combines connections: Speedify combines the two cellular connections, packet by packet, into a single more reliable internet connection.
- Accessories: selfie stick, external battery pack (10,000 mAh), additional lighting via flashlight
- Audio for communication with the Restream studio: via local number dial-in on a Google Meet.
Challenges
The team looked at a couple of alternatives that sounded like good ideas but did not work out.
The way that guests work on most cloud based video studios is that the guests join a WebRTC session in the browser. But WebRTC in the browser on a phone has very poor image quality. It often appears to be 320×240 for no clear reason. The difference between what the web clients send on the same hardware vs what a native app like Larix, streaming RTMP, can send is shocking.
That limited the choice of cloud video software. Restream Studio was the only one the team found that takes in an RTMP stream as a live guest.
Alex Gizis, host of Speedify Live, broke his ankle that summer while fumbling with a laptop as he got ready to stream. So laptops and complicated equipment were ruled out for navigating a medieval castle, and the team stuck to mobile phones for safety and mobility.
How the Livestream Was Planned
The plan: livestream from a smartphone with a dedicated app, combining the two internet sources. Since the castle is in a fairly remote area, the target was HD quality (720p at 30 fps), and the team planned to arrive a couple of hours before the tour to test cellular coverage.
When you’re livestreaming IRL, you certainly recognize the benefit of “mapping” out the area you want to stream from in terms of connectivity when you’re doing this from remote or rural areas. Your audience deserves the best when it comes to live video quality, so this is just a small effort to make in order to avoid issues like no signal areas which might lead to you dropping out from the stream.
Broadcast Details for the Dracula’s Castle Tour
When: October 28, 2021, 15:20 GMT; the tour began at 15:30.
Where: Twitch, YouTube, Facebook
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