Enhance Streaming Mode

Introduced in Speedify 9.6, and further improved in Speedify 12.5 Enhance Streaming Mode is the best option for those who live stream, use VoIP to make calls, or who use conference or video call apps like Zoom, Google Meet, Slack Calls, WhatsApp, Skype or Microsoft Teams.

What is Enhance Streaming Mode?

Having Enhance Streaming enabled will automatically identifies audio and video streams, and then:

  • Provides Quality of Service (QoS) by prioritizing streaming traffic over other types of web traffic, so that web browsing and software updates won't mess up your calls and live streams.
  • Monitors how much bandwidth your stream requires and watches the statistics on how each of your Internet connections is behaving
  • Automatically switch the streams between bonding and redundancy based on which will work better. It's dynamic, so you get exceptional performance, even if you're on a moving train where the best settings may change minute by minute.

This means for example:

  • If you are doing a conference call at the edge of the range of your Wi-Fi and many packets are being dropped, Enhance Streaming Mode will stream the packets that make up the conference call on both Wi-Fi and cellular and only deliver whichever packet arrives first so that the call is protected from the unreliable connection.
  • If you are trying to live stream at 10 Mbps on 7 Mbps Wi-Fi and a 5 Mbps cellular connection, Enhance Streaming will bond the connections to send around 7 Mbps on the Wi-Fi and about 3 Mbps on the cellular and then put the packets back together on the Speed Server to deliver to your video server (or perhaps Twitch or Facebook Live's server)
  • If you are streaming 10 Mbps on 100 Mbps Wi-Fi and 15 Mbps cellular, and the Wi-Fi has low latency, and no loss, Enhance Streaming Mode will just send the stream on your Wi-Fi. It will keep monitoring the situation, and if it detects loss, latency, or reduced bandwidth then it will activate one of the other strategies.

Speeds and Speed Tests: the goal of Enhance Streaming is to make sure your streams get the bandwidth they need up to 30 Mbps. Live Streams and calls are very consistent using around 30 Kbps for audio, or to 5 Mbps for HD video to 25 Mbps for 4K video. So running a speed test to test Enhance streaming mode will not tell you anything useful. The speed test is not a stream and will not be treated as a priority.

Battery: With Enhance Streaming enabled there are scenarios where it can keep all of your connections (Wi-Fi and Cellular, for example) active, using elevated amounts of battery. However, in these cases, your call, conference, or live stream, would have been disconnected, without Speedify's Enhance Streaming enabled!

Status

Based on our testing, we believe the core of it works very well, and you will find your streams and calls working better in Streaming Mode. The current user interface and statistics, however, are very much a work in progress and will improve in subsequent releases.

If you believe you've found a problem while streaming, we want to know! Please generate your logs and email the logs to support@speedify.com and tell us what you were doing, and what went wrong. We're here to help!

To Turn on Enhance Streaming

Click the gear icon to go to the main Settings menu, then click on "Bonding Mode" under the Session Settings section. By default, Enhance Streaming is enabled. 

Statistics

Once Enhance Streaming is enabled, the current streams will appear at the bottom of your Dashboard. The number of Active streams is how many streams Speedify detects right now.

If you want to view previously completed live streams, you can click on Completed from the Dashboard.

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