Live streaming with the Mevo

It has just been a year since Facebook launched its ‘live’ feature for all us plebs. It still holds a high ranking in their algorithm and a bunch of cool gadgets have come out to meet the craze. Today was my first experiment with the Mevo, a tiny camera designed for live-streaming.

My particular reason for setting up the Mevo remains classified but I can tell you that the Mevo role was to play referee between two neighbors each  claiming to be on one side of the law.

The interface is super easy, one button to fire it up and one other to start the stream on the camera and the rest is managed from the app on your phone. I caught a snag once I climbed 30 feet up the tree and it wouldn’t connect to the wifi. I knew someone else got it to connect from this exact spot before but I needed to try something else. I dismounted the ladder and walked back towards to wifi router. It connected when it was about 20 yards from the 4G wifi router. Then I walked back up the ladder and it held its connection. In all, the Mevo was about 50 yards from the router.  Mevo has cellular LTE data capabilities but this would have added quite a bit of doe to the short project so the experiment remained in wifi. Every few days, something snags the connection and you can not reset it remotely. This is its main drawback at least using wifi. If you snuck the Mevo inside a lion’s cave and the stream went down, you’d wish they put a few more remote management features in.

We also were able to get an extension cord out to power the little guy indefinitely. The basic battery will stream for an hour while the premium ‘boost’ battery can do ten hours. The boost also boasts the capability to have direct connections with either your router or computer via ethernet and USB ports. A nice accessory but it will set you back another $250. It takes in a microUSB for power so you could connect your own bigger batteries to extend past the ‘boost’ battery capabilities.

The Boost

Options for streaming are to use LiveStream and Facebook Live, while YouTube live is currently only for ios users. The live editing capabilities are what is really the dealmaker. The ability to make what look like ‘cuts’ to zoomed-in parts of your stream make it look like multiple cameras are at work. The ability to do panning in the stream simulate the feel of a person there filming  by hand. A pretty badass tool for various fast-paced, understaffed, DIY, video projects.

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