"It's connected but nobody sees it"

Symptom

The encoder says it's connected, the preview window is playing, but the creator's own account on a platform doesn't show a live stream — or a teammate asks "are we live?" and nobody's sure.

Cause

Stream tracks two separate facts, and conflating them is the single most common source of confusion in the product:

• Signal (blue) — the receiving box is getting a feed. Nothing has been sent to any platform. Only the person watching the panel sees anything.
• On-air (green) — the cockpit's "go live" action has fanned the composed frame out to every armed platform.

An encoder reporting "connected" only ever means signal. The gap between the two is deliberate: it's the window where a creator fixes their light, angle, or caption before anyone else sees it.

How to check

• Look at the state chip in the cockpit, not the encoder's own "connected" indicator — the encoder only knows about its own upload, not about fan-out.
• If the chip reads signal and stays there, the cockpit's "go live" action hasn't run yet — that's the only thing that flips a feed from signal to on-air.
• A platform showing nothing live, with the panel showing on-air, points at that one platform's own target configuration instead — see Choose which platforms receive your stream.

What's next

Motor not connected yet — a different kind of "it looks stuck," specific to webcam platforms.