Copy-first relaying: how we protect your stream quality and your CPU
Many multistream services re-encode your video in the cloud. We don’t — we copy it. Here’s why that keeps your quality intact and your upload flat no matter how many platforms you add.
The problem with re-encoding
A lot of restreaming services decode your incoming video and re-encode it for each destination. That’s convenient for them, but every re-encode adds latency and shaves a little quality off what your audience sees — and it’s why some services meter or throttle bitrate.
What copy-first means
Stream Repeater relays copy-first: we take the exact feed you send and copy it straight through to each platform without re-encoding it. The picture and sound your viewers get are the ones you produced — nothing is degraded in the relay, and there’s no extra latency introduced on our side.
It also means you upload once. Adding a fourth or fifth destination costs you no more upload bandwidth or frames, because the duplication happens on our servers, not your machine.
The trade-off, stated honestly
Copy-first means each platform receives the resolution and bitrate you sent — we don’t transcode down to a per-platform ladder. In practice that’s exactly what most creators want: send a good 1080p feed once and reach everyone with it. When you genuinely need on-the-fly transcoding, that’s a different tool; for the vast majority, copy-first is faster, cleaner and cheaper.