This document provides a guide for live streaming video with smartphones. It discusses important aspects like activating airplane mode to avoid interruptions, ensuring sufficient battery life and connectivity, using accessories like tripods for stable images, and choosing lenses or microphones to improve image and audio quality. It also describes how to produce engaging live streams, such as switching between camera angles and editing clips, and distributing the content across different social media platforms.

1. The guide to video
streaming with
smartphones

2. Contents
o Introduction
o Activate airplane mode
o Have sufficient autonomy
o Ensure connectivity
o Image stability
o Image quality
o Audio quality
o How to produce agile live video and how to heighten its impact

3. Introduction
With this guide you will learn everything you need to know on how to live
stream with mobile devices, which aspects are most important while
broadcasting live videos and what accessories are essential to offer your
audience a high quality product.
New mobile devices appear every day, with improved cameras and more
functionalities, offering better image quality and getting closer and closer to
professional film standards.

4. Activate airplane mode
To avoid this problem, we recommend you to turn your device to airplane mode
during the entire streaming, so it will not receive any incoming calls. If you do not
activate this setting, and someone calls you on that phone, your device could freeze
or even stop your broadcast. If you lose those contents, your transmission will be
forever incomplete.
The smartphones were mainly designed to communicate people through audio calls,
besides its creative outlets. At the time of creating a live stream, we have to dedicate our
mobile entirely to capture audio-visual content. We don’t want to stop the image and
sound recording because of a phone call.

5. Have sufficient autonomy
There are batteries that may extend your phone’s autonomy up to 10 hours. Although,
the most reliable thing will always be to keep the phone connected, through the
charger, to a power socket. Remember to keep your batteries fully charged when
starting a broadcast to increase their autonomy during the streaming.
All mobile devices have limited autonomy. Depending on the model, the battery life will
be longer or shorter. In any case, we will always have an established autonomy that, in
most cases, we will want to prolong. This is why there are external batteries of different
capacities for many different uses.

6. Ensure connectivity
If you don’t have any Wi-Fi at your broadcast location connection, you can also ensure
stability through wireless routers with 4G connection. As long as you have a 4G signal in
the area, you can stream all the video you want to.
This is one of the most important technical aspects while streaming a live show, since
we’ll have to work with a very stable Internet connection to ensure that users have a
good visual quality of the content. About 2Mbps of upload will be necessary for each
smartphone. Even if your smartphone has 4G, we recommend you to use a local Wi-Fi
network. this will allow you to maintain a permanent Internet connection while you’re
using airplane mode.

7. Image stability
While streaming any kind of event, you have to get the image to be as stable and fluid as
possible. Avoid sudden movements on your camera, so your audience doesn’t’ get distracted
from the contents. Also, if you stream with more than one device, place your cameras in
different positions around the spot where the action takes place, so you can choose between
different camera shot sizes.
Therefore, the use of tripods, monopods or steadycams is almost mandatory. There are
solutions in multiple price ranges, depending on the quality of the material, its size and its
purpose. If you broadcast a conference, for example, you’ll want to use a tripod, but if you’re
broadcasting a manifestation in the street, maybe you’ll want to move around, in which case
the monopod will be the best solution. In order to hold the mobile device on the tripod or
monopod, you’ll need a grip, or an adapter for their support.
When acquiring a tripod or monopod, take into account its size and height. Also note that
many monopods can be turned into a tripod.

8. Image quality
Depending on the smartphone camera sensor, you’ll have better or worse image quality.
Sometimes, for circumstantial reasons, we are forced to locate our camera at a distance from
where the zoom is not powerful enough to capture a speaker at the lectern. Or perhaps we just
don’t like the digital zoom our phone is capable of.
The best solution is to get a zoom lens, since it doesn’t degrade the image quality, although it
commonly adds distortion along the edges. In the event this distortion appears along the image
edges, and we can easily eliminate it by zooming in on the centre of the phone’s image. There
are also several lenses for more artistic purposes, modifying the way in which the phone
captures the image, such as fish eye lenses or wide-angle lenses; the latter capture the space
with the largest viewing angle.
Another possibility, and one of the best when it comes to image quality, is to purchase an
adapter for professional optics, from manufacturers such as Canon or Nikon. The problem here
is that not many manufacturers make the effort to develop adapters for smartphones. These
adapter are also of a higher price range, which may derail your budget and could affect the
flexibility of your operation, since professional optical tools are heavy and big, compared to
auxiliary lenses for smartphones.

9. Audio quality
Many times, a smartphone’s internal microphone is not enough to obtain a clear voice sound.
There are multiple factors such as distance, noise or echo, all getting in the way of a minimally
audible streaming. If you want to clearly capture the sound from a greater distance, using a
microphone will be your best strategy.
How to choose an external microphone:
We will present 4 types of external microphones, so you can choose which accessory is best for
the streaming you have in mind.
➢ Lavalier microphones
Also known as tie or lapel microphones. If we want to stream an interview, where we have to
capture the audio of a conversation, tie microphones will be the most flexible option.
It is even possible to integrate multiple lapel microphones, so you capture the conversation of
two or more people, each with their respective microphone. Currently there are multiple
products with these characteristics. IK Multimedia and Rode are just two of the companies that
have developed products in this range.

10. Audio quality
➢ Directional microphones
Using a directional microphone, we can capture the ambient sound with higher quality than if we
did it with the smartphone’s microphone. Again, Rode is on top of the list of companies that invest
in developing this type of microphones for smartphones.
➢ Professional microphones
You also have the possibility of integrating professional microphones into smartphones. Through a
preamplifier we can connect the Canon XLR plug to our device. Also, in many cases we can use
microphones that require “phantom voltage”, since these preamps are equipped with a battery
that provides +48 volts.-
➢ Capture audio from a professional audio table
In the event we want to create streaming of an event with a professional sound system, the best
choice in terms of audio quality will be to ask that they send you the signal for the professional
audio table, which you can capture with your smartphone. To receive the signal from the table, we
will need a preamplifier for mobile devices. We will also need the sound technician to send us the
output of the table through a Canon XLR cable, which we connect directly to our amplifier.

11. How to produce agile live video and how
to heighten its impact
Now that you know everything you need to start streaming with a mobile device, you should
find out how to produce a live stream and how you can increase its impact on social networks
with Watchity technology.
1. Capture the best scenes with mobile phones or other low-cost cameras, individually or with a
team, even allowing the participation of external users, and transmitting it all in real time via Wi-
Fi or 4G.
2. Produce a broadcast-quality live streaming by switching cameras and adding graphic layers.
At the same time, create clips from the live streaming, using advanced editing functions.
3. Distribute the live and pre-recorded content simultaneously on your website (with the
embedded Watchity player) and on Facebook Live, Periscope, Instagram or Youtube Live, in an
integrated way.

12. If you want more information, you can found
interesting documents here:
https://www.watchity.com/en/resources/
Thanks for your attention!