Bonds all your links
Phones over USB, USB modems, Wi-Fi and Ethernet all carry the same stream at once. Their bandwidth adds up.
Gleem IRL Sidekick Closed beta
IRL Sidekick, a small box in your backpack, bonds your phones, USB modems, Wi-Fi and Ethernet into one stream. When a link drops, the others carry on, and you run the whole thing from gleem.gg.
Why bond
One mobile connection is never enough on the street. IRL Sidekick spreads your stream over all of them, and keeps it up when one of them gives out.
Phones over USB, USB modems, Wi-Fi and Ethernet all carry the same stream at once. Their bandwidth adds up.
IRL Sidekick watches every link and adjusts the encoder's bitrate to what they can carry right now, so the picture gets softer before it stutters.
H.265 or H.264, encoded in hardware straight from the camera on the HDMI input, sound included.
Start and stop the stream, change the bitrate and the encoder settings from gleem.gg, from anywhere. Your moderator can stay at home.
See what each link sends, its round trip and its losses, and how much of the stream arrives at the ingest server.
IRL Sidekick checks for updates every day and tells you. You install them with one click, and never in the middle of a stream.
Street-tested
Our first production test: 2 h 52 min on the train and on foot through the city. A Raspberry Pi 4 sending 1080p in H.264 over two phones.
The bars start at 90 %. The figures for each phone alone are an estimate from the same trip: the time that phone's own link was live.
On the train, both phones lost the network at the same moment 20 times, 1 min 10 s in total. No bonding bridges that. A third link on another network can.
How it works
Write the IRL Sidekick image for your board, an Orange Pi 5 Plus or a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, to a microSD card. Everything your IRL Sidekick needs is on it.
Get the imageConnect your camera by HDMI, and your phones and modems by USB. IRL Sidekick brings every link up by itself.
Open IRL Sidekick's web interface, choose "Connect to Gleem" and approve the code it shows in your dashboard.
Start the stream from IRL Sidekick or from gleem.gg. In OBS, one Media Source with your private pull URL receives it.
Illustration of the device page. Names and numbers are examples.
Remote control
Once paired, your IRL Sidekick checks in with gleem.gg every few seconds and takes commands in real time. You never need to reach into your backpack.
Start or stop the stream, move the bitrate window while you are live, and change the codec, resolution or bonding mode for the next start.
Every link, the encoder, the temperatures and what arrives at the ingest server, updated live on the device page.
The device page keeps a history of your streams: how long they ran, how much data they used, and their average and peak bitrate.
No port forwarding and no fixed IP address needed: IRL Sidekick always connects out to Gleem, never the other way round.
Good to know
A small box that sends your IRL stream over several connections at once, and a service on gleem.gg that receives it and lets you control your IRL Sidekick. Your stream then goes into OBS, wherever it runs.
An Orange Pi 5 Plus, or a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with a USB HDMI capture card, plus a microSD card, a camera with HDMI out, and the phones or USB modems you want to bond.
Phones tethered over USB, USB modems, Wi-Fi and Ethernet, in any mix. Each one is used on its own, so a link from one network never has to wait for another.
The Orange Pi 5 Plus has an HDMI input, and IRL Sidekick takes the picture and the sound from it. Plug your camera's HDMI out straight in; no capture card needed. On a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 a USB HDMI capture card (UVC, MJPEG) takes the place of the HDMI input, picture and sound included.
Not yet. Gleem IRL Sidekick is in closed beta and needs a Gleem creator page. Join with the button on this page: connect Discord, accept the beta terms and you are in, as long as there are seats left.
Nothing during the beta. You bring the hardware and your mobile data. We will say well in advance before anything changes.
Your device page has a private pull URL. Add a Media Source in OBS, untick "Local File" and paste it in. If it ever leaks, issue a new one with one click.
The other links carry on, and IRL Sidekick lowers the bitrate to what they can take. When the link comes back, it joins in again on its own. Only when every link drops at the same moment, in a tunnel for example, does the stream pause until one is back.
Split adds up your links' bandwidth for the best picture. Redundant sends everything on every link, for when staying live matters more than quality.
To a Gleem ingest server in Germany, and from there only to the OBS you point at it. Gleem does not publish it anywhere by itself.
It checks for signed updates from Gleem every day. You install them from IRL Sidekick or from gleem.gg, and never while it is streaming.
In closed beta
Gleem IRL Sidekick is in closed beta for Gleem creators, and free while it lasts. Connect Discord and you are in, while seats last.