Live stream sports from phone

[FlatKrant]

Hello,

I will go to the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix and the Formula 1 Austrian GP next year. I am planning to live stream parts of it. FlatKrant is a small news site so we do not have 50 subscribers wich you need to broadcast on a mobile phone. That is why is was looking for a way to connect my phone to OBS on my PC. That way i can broadcast to YouTube. It is not ideal because graphics have to be added by someone in the Netherlands 850 kilometers away. But i think that it is the only option because YouTube doesnt allow channels with less then 50 subscribers to stream from a mobile phone. If YouTube is not possible i could try Twitch. I do prefer YouTube because i already have some experience broadcasting from a PC there. I have looked at systems like a LiveU Solo but they are pretty expensive for a small hobby news site. If YouTube and Twitch are not possible, i can record footage and upload it later via the camper where we control our radio station (FlatKrant RADIO) after every day at the Grand Prix weekend.

I am aware that there are rules set in place by the FOM about broadcasting F1. It is allowed as long as you do not use profesional equipment. A phone or GoPro would be allowed.

I hope that someone has a solution and sorry for my bad English.

 

[AaronD]

I like this app for Android:

IP Webcam - Apps on Google Play

Turn your phone into a wireless camera!

play.google.com

It has ads, but only on the phone itself. OBS doesn't see them. The phone and the OBS machine have to be on the same network, and then you can point a browser source in OBS to the URL that the phone app gives you. Just add /video on the end of the URL to get that instead of the controls.

A big reason why I like it is that there are no outside URL's involved at all. I've seen some that have you point every device in your rig to their central server, and then the server figures it out and configures your devices to talk to each other (or something like that), but this one is only ever a direct connection. No internet required, not even to set up in the first place. (but you do need it to download the app, of course)

So if you get there and find that you can't get internet, you can still record and upload later.

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I'm sure there are equivalents for iPhone, but I don't know what they are.

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You're probably going to eat your phone battery, keeping it on for a long time like this, never sleeping. So make sure you have a good charger too, that you can use continuously while it's running.

 

[FlatKrant]

I do not have a WiFi connection at the Grands Prix. Do you know if there are apps for IOS who support 4G or 5G?

 

[AaronD]

I do not have a WiFi connection at the Grands Prix. Do you know if there are apps for IOS who support 4G or 5G?

If your phone has a "WiFi Hotspot" feature (or whatever your gear calls it), then you can use the phone's internet for your laptop too. My Android phone does that, and I've used it both for normal web browsing on my laptop where there wasn't WiFi at all, and to control a presentation from my phone without messing with the venue's network. The presentation itself was on my laptop, which was connected to my phone's hotspot, and my phone ran the control app for it.

The WiFi connection between the phone and the laptop is the same as any other WiFi, and you may or may not have a setting in the phone to allow other devices to see each other. If you do, it needs to be turned off so that you get a normal network between your phone and laptop, and not "internet only".

So then your data path would be:
Phone camera -> WiFi to laptop -> OBS processing and compression -> WiFi back to phone -> 4G/5G to internet
The compressed video from OBS to internet, is much less than the raw feed from camera to OBS, so I'm not too concerned about that. Just make sure that your 4G/5G connection can support the compressed video feed. As far as the cloud server is concerned, the phone is just another router; you're still streaming from your laptop, not your phone.

And, make sure that your rig *still* works on-site, in the moment! It might be perfect at home, or even at the track with nobody there, but then the crowd and all of their radio-noisy devices can kill it.
Solving that problem would require either a wire to somewhere less congested, or professional gear that comes with an intentionally expensive license to use a different part of the radio spectrum, so that no one else interferes with you.
So the people who made the "no pro" rule, probably knew what they were doing, on several fronts.

 

[JohnPee]

I've used an app called Prism Live on an Android phone to stream to Twitch over WiFi and 4G, I think at one point in time it would let you stream to YouTube without the 50 subscriber limit..