How to Stream Video in an RV or Boat - Tips for YouTube, Netflix, Hulu over Mobile Internet

getting your video streaming fix on the road it is possible hi there I'm Cherie Chris and we run the mobile Internet Resource Center and streaming video for our viewers and voters is a popular topic that we cover a lot and it's something that this travelers want to do but I thought people traveling are supposed to be out traveling and touring and spending 24/7 out in nature were doing touristy stuff you're not supposed to sit home and watch TV museums only campfires no watching TV if you choose to travel no no no you know no matter what kind of trouble you're doing they might be a rainy day or you might just be in the mood to sit home and binge watch stuff and that is okay you might be in the middle of a pandemic should have nothing else to do but stream videos heck you're watching a YouTube video you stream videos and but a lot of people are concerned about how it practical is it to do streaming video and to watch TV over there while they're traveling where they don't have their home cable connections or their traditional ways of getting that television so we're going to talk today about it is possible in all the different ways you can do it via your mobile devices so using mobile internet so Wi-Fi cellular maybe even satellite to get your streaming fix now the first challenge with video streaming is video use this a lot of data we get people who come to us all the time who said all I want to do is watch the video yeah I don't care about anything else on the internet I just want to do do my Netflix as I okay well a picture's worth a thousand words and a video is worth thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures it's a lot of information going over the wire over the Internet to you so so you're saying a video is like a moving picture it is like a moving picture and it takes a lot of data and so cell carriers and just internet plans in general can get easily overwhelmed and overloaded you need to pick your plans and your devices in your gear properly to be able to get enough data to make video practical so video can use a lot of data and as an example standard resolution to high-definition video so anywhere from 40 peach at 1080p can burn anywhere from 1 to 3 gigabytes per hour now if you go to 4k video that jumps up a lot it goes up to 7 gigabytes to 15 gigabytes to potentially even more an hour it all depends on how deeply compressed and how much information is in that video and how actively it has been squinched down but for the higher res videos it can burn through a data plan ridiculously fast or you can use an entire months worth of a limited data plan in just a matter of one video so keep that in mind lower your resolutions to the lowest that you can tolerate on your screen if you want to save the data it also matters for the speeds that you need so extreme that much data you have to have speeds that are capable of handling it or else you get something that's called buffering and you've probably seen it that's when you get the spinning beach ball that's when your video just stops and pauses or it gets pixelated that's when your computer or your TV screen is trying to wait for the data stream to catch up now for standard resolution videos you're gonna need one two three megabit per second as a minimum to get a smooth stream and HD a more than 720 or 1080 a 5 to 8 to even 10 megabits per second there's really pushing it for getting some decent HD quality streaming if you were gonna go 4k you're gonna need 20 to 25 megabit per second now that's pot those speeds are possible on mobile internet but we all know mobile internet connections can be very variable and sometimes you just can't get those speeds so now you need a lot of data and you need a fast connection now what are the ways you're actually going to be able to get that to your devices starting with using Wi-Fi so you go to your campground or your marina and they advertise free Wi-Fi and you think wait I'm gonna stream my Netflix tonight I'm gonna catch up on my YouTube videos oh good luck with that now summary doesn't have front of doing a really good job that got enough bandwidth go around it's getting where it's not always we used to say never ever count on it now you sometimes can get lucky but the problem is you know the Wi-Fi is being shared by so many people that a lot of places love raising inference I've actually put in limits and blocks to stop streaming because it overwhelms the network so so many people start streaming other people can't even get their email other places that haven't done that well it's just they start to conflict with each other and you'll just be upsetting your neighbors if you're streaming so only really push streaming over public and campground Wi-Fi sources if you know the network's up to it and you know your neighbors aren't going to be upset because you're bringing down the network for everyone so do a little bit of homework make sure it's okay on the network you're at and then just go to tau streaming but don't count on it yes streaming is going to be important to you and you're going to be moving locations you're probably going to want to bring your own connection to make sure that you can get your needs met and the next option that a lot of us use is cellular data connections and that's a connection that can come over a mobile hotspot device you're gonna have a data plan with one of the cellular carriers and you're gonna need a data plan that could handle a lot of data and now these data plans us also have kind of two different ways of treating data they treat the data that you do on device so if you're watching video on this little screen differently than the data that if you're creating it from a hotspot or from a personal hotspot here and sharing it to your TV or your Roku or some other big screen devices or your laptops that data is usually much more limited than on device data right if you notice a lot of these so-called unlimited data plans unlimited on device data if they have caps on that mobile hotspot you set high speed maybe it's 10 15 30 gigabytes some planes even up to 100 gigabytes down I don't gigabytes gets to be pretty usable you can watch no video but you're gonna run into caps really quickly if you're using that mobile hotspot data caps so you're either gonna want to go with hotspot capable plans that have unlimited or high cap data and those are sometimes rare to find no we do have a guide to the current topic data plan so you can go shop there and see what the current kids are but you're gonna have to find a plan that can do mobile hotspot odds are off of a device like this mobile hotspot off your phone or off of a router to be able to use that for using one of these streaming boxes like a Roku or Apple TV or even a smart TV yeah now on the other hand if you're going to be trying to use your on device day do you think might be asking you well I don't want to watch my Game of Thrones on a screen this big but there's actually a way you can use your on device data and still watch on your big screen and that's by using HDMI out from your device's so for iOS devices iPhones tablets and things like that they sell this adapter basically plugs into the Lightning port over the USBC port then you plug it into an HDMI cable and plug that into your big screen and now most streaming apps will support that and will let you play in high resolution up on your big screen and it still counts as on device data so you're not going to run it you can still take advantage of unlimited on device data the reason why that is is all you're doing is casting or mirroring the image from your smartphone or tablet to the larger screen you're not actually using mobile hotspot you're not using an additional data connection to power your larger screen now if you have an Android device you'll have to look into different options there there are you know other types of adapters like USB see adapters for devices that have USB see out like I'm also some of the newer iPads that will give straight to HDMI some Android support this as well the important thing is your device has to support it the app has to support it most streaming apps do and a lot of the cellular devices do in both Android and all iOS too but then people would ask like what about using some of the wireless things like airplay or chromecast unfortunately when you're doing that when you're doing airplay from here you think you're just mirroring your screen but you're actually handing off the connection to your Apple TV or to your chromecast device and the chromecast is then doing the streaming so that doesn't count is on device data the one type of Wireless that does is if you use miracast which some android support that is that basically a wireless hdmi cable and that will work and be treated just the same as being wired gets a little tricky we've got a lot more about how all these different standards work in our guys so go check their for yours type of device but it is possible to just get an unlimited smartphone plan and or tablet plant there's a great deals on unlimited tablet plans as well and just doing that hdmi screencasting that means you aren't gonna have to use your device to treat it like your remote control yeah you're gonna have to find the the shows that you want to do you're fast-forwarding everything on the device you're not gonna build to use a standard remote control and that may be fine but depends on how long that HDMI cable is from your screen to where you're watching it how practical that is now the one other thing to note with us doing video over cellular is a lot of cellular carriers they actually cap for you the streaming speeds and might depend on the plan and they'll say a video is capped at SD resolution or 720p resolution or HD resolution and that basically means the carrier is detecting video streams and putting in a throttle behind the scenes just on video to try and keep the data usage from overwhelming their network so know the limitations of your plan particularly if you want to watch an HD or 4k now the different streaming services that are out there Netflix Hulu YouTube all these different services that are out there some of them are more mobile friendly than others I'm work on your smartphone so I'm gonna need to be on a streaming device like an Apple TV or a Roku and they also have a lot of variation in how well they deal with mobile connections whether the the connection is the speeds are varying weather there's drop-offs and stuff the services that are more focused on home residential streamers don't do nearly as good a job the services that are bigger and have more engineering effort do a really really good job in particular Netflix deals with flaky mobile connections really well yeah the connect the picture quality might drop for you automatically behind the scenes but it still looks really good as the connection gets bad and then it'll ramp back up when it actually gets good so if you're having trouble streaming on one service try switching to another you know YouTube and Netflix are probably the two best for dealing with bad connections so you can't watch HBO I'll switch to Netflix and do other things to look for in your streaming services is another feature being able to download your content to watch later this is a great way when you do have a really good connection you can download your content and then watch it when you get to your next location which may not have a good connection you might not have an unlimited connection there and you can actually even use this if you have a bad connection and a slow connection because when you're downloading you don't care how long it takes to buffer if it takes two hours to download a half-hour show no big deal because when you go to watch it it plays just fine off your device so look for the apps and streaming services that support downloading for offline viewing and queue up fill up your iPad with a whole bunch of videos to watch and you'll have a library with you even when you have bad connections over-the-air just remember a lot of them have expiration dates so they will disappear if you don't watch them after a certain amount of time now another feature to look at is there's a lot of streaming services that are catering to watching live television over a streaming service and this is where it can get tricky because a lot of them are geo lock based upon protection rights that they have to the content they're streaming right so they want to determine that you are in the official area that you're your address is registered that your account is tied to and it can be very tricky if they detect that your service address doesn't match where you're actually located and you might have issues with live watching a live channel and just know that this is gonna be a headache you might have to to play around with things different services and force the Geo locks in different ways so do your homework we have a lot more data about this again in our figure online gaiden and be prepared to experiment to find out what works for you and of course there's all sorts of alternatives to getting your media and entertainment fix on the road from renting discs taking discs along with you borrowing them remember you don't have to stream you can actually go to a red boxing or kind of like a vinyl LP right a track and put that into your TV or into a blu-ray player I guess right there's over-the-air television that still exists that's out there if you have satellite T systems you can get your satellite TVs so there's all sorts of options but for streaming it is entirely possible over mobile internet and this is a topic of interest to you follow up on our full guide mobile internet infocomm slash TV and we have a ton of information there as well as links to some of these connectors that we talked about and much more information we keep that updated all the time as all the streaming services change and as well as these streaming policies for all of the carriers and data plans out there the important thing is you can get your binge fix on on the go being mobile and it can be great but so remember to get out there and see the place as you go as long as you can place and and have a good these videos are brought to you by our premium members they make it possible for us to track this news and create these videos if you like this video please give it a thumbs up leave a comment subscribe to our channel or better yet consider becoming a member yourself

Channel: Mobile Internet Resource Center

Views: 50,336

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Id: ZlrVUbzEYhQ

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020