The truth about live-streaming

There’s no doubt that successfully live-streaming your race is a fantastic addition to your race weekend. It not only gives great visibility to your sponsors and allows your friends and family to get a sneak peek of what it's like behind the wheel, but it also provides easy and effortless access to replays, lets you relive the thrilling moments with your teammates, and extends the high of your race weekend… 

That’s great! When it works…

There’s nothing more frustrating than losing your livestream during the race (sometimes, right after the green flag drops). Everything is working perfectly, you or your teammate jump in the car, the race starts, and suddenly... the stream stops.

Why, what happened?

In short, simply mounting your equipment in the car and starting the stream without any testing prior to the race may work at best 50% of the time. Unless you have experience with live streaming, know the car, know the track has perfect network coverage, your equipment is flawless, and you benefit from ideal weather conditions (perfectly cool and dry), more preparation, thought, and care are required to increase your success rate. Regardless of the equipment you’re using, every race weekend is likely to bring new issues and like a lot of things in racing, you will need to be diligent to be successful at it.

Over the past few months, we’ve been on a mission to make live streaming easier and more reliable, for example by experiencing and documenting what can go wrong (regardless of the equipment and streaming platform used), improving things, and repeating the process to maximize our chance for success at the next race. While not all problems can be addressed  — such as poor network connectivity at the track — many issues can be avoided with good preparation, care, and some ingenuity to make your equipment survive the extreme conditions it’ll face inside a race car, knowing that it has probably not been designed to be there in the first place. The same care that racing teams use in building, preparing, and improving their cars to pull through all the craziness happening on track should be applied to live-streaming in order to make it work well and with minimal headaches… At least until more experience is acquired. With experience, it can become a routine task but until then, expect some tears and sweat!

Here are 3 tools to help you avoid common mistakes and make this challenging learning journey easier:

1. Ask other racing teams about the equipment they use and their experience.

2. Check out the list of potential issues we wrote based on our own experience (2min read).

3. Add a list of “Live Stream” tasks to your race weekend routine/checklist/worksheet and make sure to designate who in the team will be responsible for it. Check out some examples shared at the end of this article: prepare livestreaming before a race weekend (1min read)

4. Check the track  “livestreaming score” in this public database to know what to expect in terms of network coverage at a specific track ahead of time.

Finally, here’s a little story of a recent live-streaming event where we faced a new challenge and what we learned from it...

Going into the race weekend, we knew that the track doesn’t have good network coverage everywhere, so we expected the stream to be quite choppy but we still wanted to try it out anyway. The temperature was cool, so we were not worried about the camera nor the hotspot suffering from overheating, especially in the cars we were live-streaming in (a Radical and a Mazda Miata).

As expected, the stream was quite choppy due to poor network coverage in some parts of the track but it was decent (a live driver-view inside a Radical is just amazing to watch even with questionable video quality). When the camera was not on track, it was used to film all the car prep activities happening under the tent in the paddock, where the network connection was excellent and so was the stream quality.

What we didn’t think through, nor had time to solve was the impact of the rain on the equipment… It was a very rainy weekend, the hotspot was not protected inside the car and got soaked. Some water infiltrated the area where the SIM card was inserted, and the hotspot eventually failed to read the SIM card... This issue happened late in the day, on the last day, so there was just not enough time to try to fix it. Thankfully the (more expensive) camera was not impacted by the rain/humidity, although its case didn’t look particularly water-proof.

In the future, we will have to better protect the equipment from the rain. We know the weather conditions significantly impact the live-streaming equipment, we had overheating issues before but the rain was a first, so we learned something and can easily address it next time!

Some simple solutions that popped to mind were:

• Place the equipment in a location better protected from the rain (if possible).

• Look into weatherproofing cases or rain covers. 

• Fabricate a rain cover with plastic or ziplock bags and some tape or zip ties (a good homemade solution - !! for last resort only !!).

Taking these precautions for our next race under the rain will certainly increase our chances of a successful live stream and we hope this will help you as well!