Live Streaming & Premieres
Stream health
Also called: stream health panel, connection status
Stream health reads what YouTube is actually receiving from your encoder and grades it as excellent, good, okay or bad. It reports incoming bitrate against what your resolution and frame rate need, plus dropped frames and connection stability. This is the panel that tells you a stream looks fine to you and broken to everyone else, since your local preview never travels over your upload connection. Watch it during the first minute of every broadcast. Most of what it flags comes down to upstream bandwidth, a wireless connection that should be wired, or an encoder bitrate set higher than the line can carry.