To stream or not to stream, That is the question...

Can you imagine that you cam perform to a small crowd, talking about what you love or of course showcasing your moves or local hometown... The thing is that when you fly it brings a new dimension of excitement to things... In this world of high tech video streaming to your phone you can imagine that with the power of the internet you can see you can gather up a bunch of spectators with in a few seconds...

 While staying on you might even see these curious people are from all walks of life and watching from different parts of the world... The internet has he ability to make one spectator become a lot more... Its you ever go on social media and click on the live videos you might see quite a few live streams gather up a lot of viewers just because its live and someone is broadcasting... The next thing is to keeping the spectators interested enough to watch more of your broadcast... This can be difficult, if you are shy and just wanna do a boring fly video with not sound or audio...

I personally engage with the viewers and hope I get enough questions to keep the ball rolling... Sometimes its a laugh when I can have a conversation with someone but generally its the old question of what drone is that how far does it fly, how much does it cost, even online stream to a few people you cant escape those noob questions... But generally you should act with some enthusiasm on the noobs and  allow them to follow on the conversations, at the very least to be a ambassador to the drone world...
When starting to broadcast its often a good idea to check your stream or internet link and use on your phone or tablet a app to check the data flow... In a typical 4G network you can see that the video can stream 720p or even 1080p depending on the network or how close is your nearest cell tower... An app would check the upstream and down stream and will generally tell you how good of a quality a link is...
The next thing is to check your phone... I generally dont get much problems with a IOS devise when it comes with broadcasting live...  However with an Android system its more or less difficult to figure out the trouble spot on why the camera view or the broadcast quality is at a poor standard even when the drone is at close quarters...

My crystalsky monitor has stream capability but until recently has very poor live stream quality... I did have a few third party apps I was using at the time but decided later I didn't need to... Having a vague theory that the processor is is being taxed every time I use it, I discovered under the settings and "apps" There is a indicator that shows how much ram the crystalsky is using at the current time... On further investigation there was a lot of unknown apps that seems to be listed that wasn't part of the software function of the DJI go4 app or the crystalskys core system...

Disabling the unknown quantity in the android OS has returned my Crystalsky  ta reasonable machine... I could only guess that this was part of the reason why DJI didn't allow third party application on their tablet because the processor would easily get bogged down... For any other android user its the same whether you use a Samsung phone or similar... The phone will display pixelation or lag... despite the low Radio Frequency interference...
This again is because the is a processor bottleneck that the phone is experiencing... Android has a tendency to pick out background processing that off hand cant be turned off... Only if you go on you-tube and tell the phone in its settings to reduce background processing... you might have a reduced the stress of the phones processor and the DJI can possibly function reasonably well... As digital video feeds require a lot of processing power for digital error correction as well as aircraft control and telemetry readout...

Of course the android phone still has no real proper editing facility to disable apps to other then what it has in the settings option... So a delicate balance of good digital signal and a decent phone with direct processing should be the main thing... This might mean if you are doing long range flying beyond 500m or in a urban environment with lot of wifi signal interference...You should invest in a modified antenna that will help filter and booster the signal... Itelite or 4 hawks or Titan antennas would help a lot...
Broadcasting itself is a simple matter of going on the 3 dots page and scrolling down to the live streaming settings and choosing a platform broadcast from... The Facebook is very simple and you only need to add a title or description to setup and perform... Weibo and QQ zone, are similar but from a Chinese social network...
While you-tube has the flexibility to live steam via ts own platform option or via RTMP... Using RTMP, you can obtain a stream address via your medias setting... For example you can use periscope directly using a phantom 4 or inspire 1or osmo connecting the controller in and  straight from the App... Or for a Mavic or similar modern drone... You can go into periscope setting then periscope producer and obtaining the RTMP address and the stream key called stream name sometimes... But using RTMP address has the disadvantage of relying on a second monitor to receive the viewers  comments or questions... Meaning you will be doubling your data usage to  basically have the same functionality as Facebook live...

In the end Live streaming is great fun and you definitely feel a nice community of droners or viewers in general when you stream... The down side the flight times and the data usage on your phone can cost you money to broadcast live... The best thing to do is to fine a social event or sport to have as a subject to follow, that way even if your viewer numbers are low you still get a lot from flying / live streaming the event... Even though from experience I cant say live streaming has expanded my follower numbers... Its still a thrill to showcase the local kite sporting talent down at my local beach...