IRL

What’s inside our mobile live streaming backpack?

Breaking boundaries, pushing the limits and going “Over the Top” as they say in the industry is increasingly becoming the best way for businesses to break out make authentic connections with customers. Authenticity has always been at the core of most successful businesses but how does “Authenticity” translate in a world of online communications? Live streaming has become that connection point between online audiences and businesses where the message is able to feel “true” in a world full of fake news and gimmicks.

From this reality comes a term called “In Real Life” popularized by content creators in the $150+ Billion Dollar gaming industry on Amazon’s live streaming platform called Twitch. In Real Life or “IRL” live streaming describes a form of live streaming that features the creator in their most authentic self. In some ways, it’s a long form style of the popular Snapchat and Instagram stories which are now being popularized on Facebook as well. It’s also a throwback to the once popular “Reality TV” series but this time it’s un-edited and made available directly to followers of their favorite content creator.

So what does this all mean for the way businesses market themselves? First of all, you must be creating content in a way that is authentic to your brand. Don’t waste your time with overly produced content especially if you are trying to connect with younger demographics. Consider showing your audience the “real” side of your business and people that make your product of service. It’s should come as no surprise that consumers want to connect with the real people behind your brand. The good news is that live streaming and social media offer the opportunity to deliver on this massive opportunity at scale!

Inside our Mobile Live Streaming Backpack

The backpack above includes about $2,000 worth of technology outlined in more detail in this blog post. It includes a LiveU Solo cellular bonding video encoder, a powerful battery, and the latest SONY Action Camera. But more importantly, this is a vehicle for transporting our audience in real time to our latest trade show. We can now share a behind the scenes view of our companies most important technology announcements, trade show appearances and much more.

For the rest of this blog post, I’d like to outline the latest trend in mobile live streaming and the backpack we have created to go completely mobile, outside of our video production studio and deliver real world, in-real-life, experiences for our audience.

So let’s take a look at what is inside the StreamGeeks mobile live streaming backpack.  We have designed this backpack to give us the ability to have a high-quality, high bit rate live streaming access from anywhere in the world with cellular service.  At the heart of our backpack is the LiveU solo cellular uplink encoder which takes an HDMI video feed from our camera and Livestreams it via RTMP anywhere we want.  This liveU solo uses multiple cellular signals and bonds them together to create a single strong connection for wireless live streaming. This type of wireless mobile live streaming backpack is being used by video production companies and small-time content creators alike.

We were first introduced to the concept of mobile live streaming from a backpack by David Foster from GeeksLife and you can check out his entire kit here. His backpack design includes a 50,000 mA power oak battery which provides the entire mobile live streaming system up to 15 hours of charge free connectivity.  This wireless battery is used to keep the live you solo charged our camera charged and our cellular modem’s.  The love you solo is able to bond together to USB cellular motives and power each one.  But we also have a third AT&T nighthawk cellular modem which connects to the live you via ethernet is powered by our battery.  This provides us with three dedicated cellular modems although the live you can’t support a fourth via Wi-Fi.  I should mention that our wireless data plans are coming from a company called unlimitedIRL.com which provides truly unlimited and unthrottled data plans for live streaming.
The backpack itself is a standard Eddie Bauer backpack which can easily fit all of our technology.  More importantly, we have purchased all our cables and connectors to have right angles to avoid issues with cables disconnecting while we are live streaming. Many IRL live-streaming backpack users report issues with cables popping out as they’re on the go.  If a USB cellular modem is disconnected during your live stream you will lose access to that data which will reduce the bit rate of your overall Livestream.

LiveU Wireless Mobile Backpack for streaming

The camera we are using is called the Sony HDR-AS300.  This Sony action camera is ideal for a small footprint great image stabilization.  Image stabilization is incredibly important when your live streaming on the go.  As you can see from our video we have the Sony action camera strap to at the shoulder mount of our backpack. This provides a great on the go experience but you can also quickly change the strap mount to a selfie stick for front facing use cases.
We are very excited about what’s possible with mobile live streaming it centralizing all of our technology into it easy to use a backpack.  If you’re interested in learning more about live streaming consider joining our Facebook.
For more information on live streaming in your church, check out this article from Church Technology Superstore!
Paul Richards

Chief Streaming Officer and official StreamGeek!

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