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I'm looking for a camera to set up to an outdoor tennis court and stream to youtube. I'm not sure what the best way of doing this would be and am looking for guidance.

The way I see it is either I get an IP Camera and livestream directly through it to youtube, or get a (preferably wireless) webcam and stream it through a dedicated PC.

I have done some tests and am successful in streaming with a webcam hooked up to my laptop, then encoding through Open Broadcaster and stream to youtube. What I'm looking for is a simpler system, where I can in the best of worlds just press a button and start streaming.

Any recommendations on type of camera etc. is greatly appreciated!

2 Answers 2

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If you cannot get your video to a wifi uplink; you will eat through your data very fast on your phone.

I speak from experience. Each carrier tower (a cel phone on a carrier only connects to a single tower at any given moment), is a standard T1 line.

One phone will not be enough, if call volume spikes; your uplink bitrate will be bottlenecked by your carrier.

The solution; if this is a serious project, is to build a streaming cel phone package. You want to use rather than phones, the 4G hotspots, which have both USB and wifi connectivity. Although phones work too.

Then you want a product like the Cradlebridge Bandsteering Router, powered off a portable 12v battery source.

The Cradlebridge Routers can use multiple network connections; my unit has 2 USB and 4 CAT5 + Wifi, which it can then, use multiple uplinks; steer the data, and make sure it gets there in the correct order at the right time. Literally, switching between your phones from say ATT, Verizon, Cingular, Sprint, etc; in case you get sqeezed off one or more of your uplinks.

At best-- best... you can expect a consistent 150-200kbps uplink on a single cel line over the LONG run. Thats not to say small uploads and videos don't go up in a snap, but a long run game... you will get squeezed out bandwidth wise. Again, doing a 20 second speed test is not going to give you realistic results for long uploads. The tower on one carrier will allow a burst, fast upload, for say 30 seconds, but then watch it drop.

So you tether 4 carriers together, each carrier will be working of a separate tower... and then use LiveStream to broadcast.

It's harder, and more frustrating, than you would think.

Lastly, do the math, on a single cel line at 200kbps x 1 hour... how many GB will you go through? Unless your data is unlimited.

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The simplest Setup is use your Phone and the YouTube APP.

See point #2: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2474026?hl=en&ref_topic=6136989 .

You can also use the APP LiveStream, from LiveStream, and serve your Video from them.

There are quite a few APPs but those two are free and more trustworthy than some you might encounter.

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  • Thank you. I guess phones would make everything very easy to set up, and you can just build your own windshield to protect them. Supplying power won't be a problem either. I do need 3 cameras, since there are 3 courts. Do you have any recommendations for affordable phones with good cameras? :)
    – callebo
    Commented Mar 16, 2017 at 12:07
  • To find an affordable Phone use a Search Engine to search for "Best 2016 Phone" (or Tablet). - EG: zdnet.com/article/… - all good; like the 'Best Camera' the best phone is the one you have (or is for sale in your area).
    – Rob
    Commented Mar 16, 2017 at 22:28

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