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Sending live video feed over long distances for live stream
Main Post:
Hi everyone!
Im looking to help my local sporting club set up a live stream service for when they host some big-ish events. There is however one key difficulty that im having issues with, and that is connectivity. The events are typically hosted in very remote forestry areas, often with either 1 bar or completely no cell service.
We are usually able to get internet set up at an "event centre". Think 20mx20m ish, somewhere everyone hangs about, the social hub if you will. This should be fine in order to actually broadcast the livestream. However, a feature we would like to have is a live cam outside of this area, somewhere between 100m - 1km away from this hub (most likely just a static cam, just set and forget). For context as its a forestry area there are typically a lot of trees in between the event centre and where the camera would ideally be placed, making direct line of sight difficult (not necessarily impossible though).
My question is how would we be able to get a camera feed from that far away back to the production setup in the event centre? Im hopeful that there are some solutions out there that don't just involve an incredibly long cable, but I haven't had any luck finding any.
Just for context, my experience in live streaming and production is the odd live stream on twitch so im very new to this kind of thing. Not too bad when it comes to the software side of live streaming, but have no idea about all the hardware out there at the moment. I appreciate any help that you guys could provide!
Top Comment: As u/relevant_interests mentioned below there’s some network protocols that can make fairly decent streams work on some not great networks. If you’re really trying to aim for wireless you could probably swing something with point to point links although you probably will need the clear line of sight. Units do exist that work in the 900mhz range, specifically designed to work without line of site (often for low volume data links at remote sites) but I think just about wherever you are in the world these operate in licensed frequencies so it might be a bit involved to get those licenses without a fixed site. I know you said the cellular coverage is poor but a large external antenna on a demountable mast might be one option. If it’s available in your area it might even be worth looking into Starlink as an option. I’d love to see another post if you come up with a solution, sounds like a really niche use case and frankly a pretty interesting challenge.