It's that most wonderful time of the year: footy season.
Well here in Australia anyway.

Streaming live to YouTube, I'm aiming to get a 720 stream up this year for live games I shoot.

Do download data rates decrease as quality settings decrease while watching a live streaming? That is, does the end user save data by selecting the 480p option (or 360/144 etc), rather than the best 720p option?

Any insights to the specific question, or general topic, appreciated and most welcome.

Hi Miggy

Absolutely!! Just do a test stream at the low data rate and you will see the image break up quite significantly. We always use 720P at around 2300kbps as a minimum but if the signal is poor then we sometimes have to drop down to a 480P stream at 1600kbps .... I certainly wouldn't go any lower than that.

The golden rule seems to be stream at around 50% of your router's tested upload speed (done on site) and you are pretty safe. We had an easy 30mbps upload at our wedding today so we technically could have easily done a 1080P feed at around 6000kbps and it would have coped easily.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the video quality is a combination of the resolution and also how much data you have to describe the content (including the visual motion). Theoretically, you could stream a 480P stream at a data rate normally suitable for 720P and have an absolutely rock solid stream (no tearing etc) for sporting activity.

It's all good fun and you don't get to change your settings on the fly. :-D

Andrew