There’s a lot happening in the 360° video space, with cameras on the market from 360Fly and Ricoh, and more coming soon from LG, Samsung, GoPro and more. While all of these cameras can take photos and record video in a full three hundred and sixty degrees, very few of them have the capability to live-stream their 360 video to the Internet.
We know that YouTube is experimenting with their live steaming support for 360 video at the moment and we wanted to know if the 360 camera we have on hand at the moment would be capable of supporting it. At the moment, the LG 360 Cam doesn’t support live streaming, and we’ve had official word from LG that there are no plans to support it on this hardware in future.
This is a bit of a shame, but we can understand why this might be the case; live encoding video can be rather processor intensive, and it would require some smarts to get the video from the camera to the phone, and from the phone on to YouTube.
We know it’s doable, because others are doing it, but LG doesn’t have plans to do so just yet. I have a sneaking suspicion that Samsung won’t be supporting it either on their upcoming Gear 360, but as the final specifications haven’t been confirmed there yet, we may well be surprised.
Stay tuned for our upcoming review of the LG 360 Cam and the other LG Friends, which should be ready in the next week or so.
Can you provide evidence, other than “we’ve had official word from LG…”?
Sure. Go grab an LG 360 CAM, and try to live stream from it. It doesn’t support it. The evidence is right there.
lol. Oh wait you’re serious? Apparently I wasn’t specific enough. You stated you’ve had official word from LG. In the form of an email or what? All we the readers have to go off is your word. Which, no offense but you’re not the Washing Post or someone like that. In other words the is no official statement from LG, this is the only article I find directly referencing 360° streaming, so it would be nice to have a cited source.
Well, I am serious. The proof is in the pudding.
However, we did ask senior staff from LG (a) at MWC ’16, (b) at the local launch in Australia and (c) at a social function mid year, and on each occasion we were told the same thing – LG has no plans to enable live streaming from the camera.
If you think about it, it’s hardly surprising an outcome. While it’s a great little camera, it was a commercial flop, and I doubt it’ll see any updates or new features. Not even twelve months old it’s basically abandonware.
ah damn, thank you sir.
Well it’s not completely abandoned, there was just a firmware and app update recently, so there’s that
well, that’s disappointing, I was hoping it would, I’d buy it then.