Gmartin777,

I have done this [last year]. I streamed 2-hours straight from the local park here.

We are pretty lucky. There's a Verizon 4G tower in the park, less than 1/2 from where we were located.

What we used, was a Verizon JetPack which provided the internet feed for our broadcast.

The difference between a phone hotspot and a JetPack is that phones continue doing other things while it is used to provide internet service [mail, social notifications, update apps, etc.]. Usually that's not an issue but something to keep in mind. As far as internet speed, do testing and see what the speeds are in the area. I tested several times before the event. Even at that, internet speeds can change dependent on how large the crowd is and what kind-of impact they put on the internet carrier feed you would be using.

A couple other considerations.

Since we were using two laptops I couldn't tether the JetPack to just one computer. Tethering can provide a better internet source than wireless sometimes does. Another is how friendly is your wireless provider with using your mobile device for long streaming sessions? Verizon doesn't care what you do with the data you buy. Others frown on it. Be sure to read your contract to see if there are limitations set for using your phone for this kind-of purpose.

We streamed at 480p which may have been pushing things a bit considering we were using mobile internet speed to stream plus 2 laptops. Most cell phones are set to live stream at 360p. That's what Samsung's built-in YouTube live streaming is set for.

Lastly, you can expect to use about 1GB and hour per computer. Have your device fully charged and And do keep it on a charger while streaming.

Good luck with your project.

~George

I've done many events using my iPhone as a hotspot over AT&T's 4G LTE network. Most of my events are about 8 hours per day. I have used Livestream.com in the past at their HD (720P) + Medium (423P) + Mobil (270P) setting which pushes data at 3.1Mbps with some success. I have had situations where the bandwidth was perfectly fine for the prelims of the event on Friday with connection upload speeds exceeding 10Mbps only to have significant problems on Saturday where connection upload speeds barely reached 1Mbps. From my side, nothing changed from day 1 to day 2 except for a larger crowd in the area and perhaps AT&T realizing I had used about 10GB of data the previous day.

My advice would be to TEST TEST TEST beforehand as much as possible to understand your upload bandwidth and plan your streaming quality settings accordingly. If you can get 2 hotspots from separate carriers, that could serve as a backup if one doesn't work as planned. Also, there is a service called Speedify which bonds a stream and sends it over multiple networks and reassembles it on the other end. I haven't attempted to use it, but it could be a way to improve your bandwidth in a remote location.

I use a verizon mifi and pushed out my livestream at 720p at 1.5mb up. Check out the quality, it was good enough to be displayed at the local bar's big screens. FYI: I had about 3 to 4 bars on signal strength and the upload speeds was about 10-12mb up and download about 20-25 down. Tested it the day before the event for about 2 hours to get my numbers.