It seems like Facebook does a thing that doesn't scale, in the interest of time: feed a minimally processed video until other streams are available. That makes sense, but I wonder if it also means that video quality on Facebook generally suffers when high-profile events are taking place.
Context on that wonder: I've always noticed that news outlets seem to carry downright horrible quality user-generated video clips of rallies, protests, and the like. Where everybody's carrying around stellar-quality video gear in their pockets these days, I've never figured out why that is.
1) Livestreaming can have very poor quality when bandwidth constrained (e.g. at an overloaded cell site at a rally)
2) Viral videos get reencoded many times in many formats. The cumulative encoding errors are not only limited by the lowest quality reencode, but also by the defects in all previous encodes with various codecs.
I bet you just answered my question - we aren't talking about a 5mbps video uploaded after the fact on home Wi-Fi, but a 384kbps video shoved down a 512kbps, TCP-unfriendly pipe as it's being shot. Thank you for that!
Context on that wonder: I've always noticed that news outlets seem to carry downright horrible quality user-generated video clips of rallies, protests, and the like. Where everybody's carrying around stellar-quality video gear in their pockets these days, I've never figured out why that is.