How to start streaming IRL

Streaming from your sofa and streaming while you walk down a street are two different problems. This page is the map of the second one, before you pick any product.

What an IRL stream is made of

Four pieces, always the same ones:

1. Something that films and encodes — your phone with an app, or a dedicated encoder in a backpack.
2. A connection that moves with you — mobile data, usually. Sometimes two SIMs at once.
3. Something that receives the feed and holds it steady while the connection wobbles.
4. Your channel, on Twitch, Kick or YouTube.

Streaming from home, pieces 2 and 3 barely matter: the fibre holds and OBS talks to the platform directly. On the street, they’re the whole problem.

The problem that defines everything

The platform doesn’t tolerate your connection dropping. If you publish to Twitch straight from your phone and you go into a lift, the stream ends. Not pauses — ends. And what your audience sees before that is a frozen picture, which is worse than a card saying you’ll be right back.

Everything else in IRL streaming is a way around that one fact.

The two ways to put it together

Your own OBS, at home, receiving your feed. Your phone sends to somewhere that receives it, your OBS at home picks it up as a source, and your OBS is what publishes to the platform. Your home connection is the one talking to Twitch, so the street dropping doesn’t end the stream.

A Cloud OBS. The same idea, except the OBS isn’t at your house: it’s already sitting next to the connection that publishes. You don’t leave a PC on, you don’t depend on your home fibre, and you can touch it from your phone while you’re out.

→ Choose your product walks through which one fits you.

The four decisions

1. The protocol. RTMP is the most compatible and the worst on a bad network. SRT recovers what gets lost. SRTLA is SRT spread across several connections at once. On the street, you want SRT or SRTLA — never RTMP. → RTMP vs SRT vs SRTLA

2. The app or encoder. Moblin and BELABOX do bonding — several connections added together. Larix and IRL Pro are single-connection and simpler.

3. The bitrate. Lower than you think. A phone on a street holds around 3 Mbps with a conservative setup, and it’s better to hold 3 than to aim at 6 and collapse every other block.

4. The scenes. You need at least three: your normal one, one for when the bitrate is bad, and one for when there’s nothing. Something has to switch between them for you, because you’ll be holding a camera. → How automatic scene switching works

What breaks the first time

• You aimed too high with the bitrate. The most common one by a distance. Measure what you actually get walking your usual route and work from that.
• You used RTMP on mobile data. It doesn’t recover from packet loss: one bad block and the bitrate collapses.
• You have no offline scene. So when the signal dies your audience gets a frozen frame instead of a card.
• You tested it standing still, at home, on wifi. That proves nothing. Test it walking, on the route you actually stream from.

Break it on purpose before it breaks you

Go live, then kill your phone’s data in the middle of the street. Watching your own stream handle it badly while nobody’s looking is much cheaper than finding out live.

Next step

• Choose your product — what to subscribe to depending on what you already have.
• Your first stream — from zero to live, step by step.