Livestream bandwidth calculator

The number you calculate is not the number you book

Every encoder tells you its output bitrate. That figure is honest and it is also useless on its own, because it describes a stream running on a circuit with nothing else on it. Real venues do not work like that.

The pattern is always the same. A venue quotes a number from a speed test run in an empty building, and the number is true when they run it. Then the room fills, the catering team starts uploading photos, the badge scanners come up, and the circuit that measured fine at ten in the morning is carrying a fraction of that by the time the keynote starts.

So the rule we work to: whatever the encoder sends, book twice it, and test the circuit on a weekday at the hour the event actually runs. Not Sunday morning. Not from the lobby.

What the multipliers mean

Going from 30 to 60 frames per second costs about half again in bitrate, not double, because consecutive frames at 60fps are more similar to each other and the codec exploits that. High-motion content is the real multiplier. Stage lighting that strobes, confetti, a camera whipping across a field: those defeat interframe compression and the bitrate has to climb to hold quality.

Slides and a talking head are the opposite. A static frame compresses to almost nothing. If your event is a panel on a lit stage with a locked-off camera, the efficient setting is not a compromise, it is the correct answer.

Redundancy that actually is redundant

A second encoder plugged into the same switch is not a backup. It is a second thing that fails at the same moment for the same reason. Redundancy means a different path out of the building: bonded cellular, a second ISP, a separate circuit the venue can prove is separate.

The checkbox in this calculator only doubles your draw when the backup shares the venue uplink, which is the case where the arithmetic matters. If your backup leaves on cellular, leave it unchecked, and size the cellular bond separately.

Common questions

How much upload speed do I need to livestream in 1080p?

For 1080p30 with speech audio, the encoder sends about 6.1 Mbps. Book at least 12 Mbps of sustained upload. The stream bitrate is not the number to ask the venue for: you need roughly double it, because a circuit running at capacity drops frames the moment anything else touches it.

Why does the calculator ask for twice the stream bitrate?

Because a venue speed test is a peak reading on an idle circuit, and your event is neither idle nor instantaneous. Staff laptops, badge scanners, guest wifi and the venue's own backups all share that uplink. Two times the stream bitrate is the ratio we book at, and it is the difference between a stream that holds for three hours and one that buffers during the keynote.

Does streaming to several platforms at once multiply the bandwidth?

Only if the encoder in the room sends each feed itself. If you push one feed to a cloud restream service and it fans the stream out to the platforms, you pay for one stream regardless of how many destinations there are. Set destinations to one in that case.

Is venue wifi ever good enough for a professional livestream?

No. Not guest wifi, and not the staff network either. Wifi is a shared medium with no guarantee of sustained throughput, and a room that fills with a few hundred phones behaves nothing like the empty room you tested in. Hardline ethernet, on a circuit nobody else is using, with a bonded cellular backup on a different path.

Will HEVC or AV1 reduce the bandwidth I need?

Yes, by roughly a third for HEVC and a little under half for AV1 at the same perceptual quality. Check the destination platform accepts the codec before you plan around it, and check the encoder does it in hardware. A software AV1 encode on event day is a way to lose the show to a hot CPU.