5-Step Checklist
To Quickly Optimise Livestream Quality
At Home 

There are many steps between the broadcast source and your screen that affect the quality of any streamed content you watch.

This low-tech checklist assumes you are at a home, not a business and aims to offer you things you can do simply to improve the amount of data that gets to your screen quickly enough to avoid buffering interruptions. (If you're at a business, simply ask your tech support to do what they can to improve your connection speed!)

The biggest and most common issue affecting your livestream quality is slow connectivity. Think of this as data competition. Too many things competing and you're quality may suffer.

Step 1 may be as far as you need to go so it's a great place to start. Let's check how fast things are now, but remember that you will be sharing data capacity from your provider with others in your street and community, so the rate you get in step one now is only an indication of what's happening at this time, not what is going to happen forever!

  1. 1
    On the device you want to use to watch the livestream, open your browser and open the page you are on now. Then click here to run a connection speedtest. (Note sometimes I'll run 2-3 tests in a row and take the average.) If you have a download speed of 5-10 Mbps you should be good to go and above that is excellent. If your download speed at 5Mbps or less please continue. After each step you may want to check the speed on your device again and if it has improved you can stop there or go on.
  2. 2
    Is your connection wired or wireless? If wired, go to step 4. If wireless can you easily change to a wired connection? If not, can you move your device closer to the router and try some of the 5 steps in this great video about optimising wireless signal inside your home.
  3. 3
    Turn off all wireless devices you are not using while you're watching this livestream. This includes printers, phones, tablets, TVs, in fact all devices that may be using data as background tasks.
  4. 4
    Turn off any other computers wired to the same internet router, and not needed right now.
  5. 5
    For the devices you have left on, pause or turn off all apps that are using cloud services or using any kind of syncing. In short, anything that syncs, pause it. This includes, browsers, photos, music, subscription services and so on. Background updates and regular checking of cloud based servers for changes can be a constant background drain on data usage.

Now click here to run a connection speedtest or two.

Please leave your feedback and any other tips below.

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