But I couldn't help but laugh at the fact that they can launch a massive rocket on the first try and land (at least) 2 cores, but the camera STILL cuts out on the drone ship.
Edit: inside the pod is fairly high-gain directional antenna mounted on motorized positioner, but it is designed to track the satellite from slow (ie. ship) or predictably moving (ie. truck) platforms and certainly cannot cope with vibrations from the landing reliably. Man-portable BGAN terminals usually have fixed antenna and officially require quite lengthly positioning process (on the other hand it will work for some value of "work" when you just throw it into car trunk and park with trunk vaguely pointing to south, but you will be lucky to get reliable phone connection, not to mention video stream, in that case).
The safety reasons don't hold, you can easily shoot from several kms away (there are people on land several kms away from the launch pad). In the worst case, you can pilot a drone from several kms away, close enough to the barge.
> any ship that far out is going to be using a commercial satellite data feed
The footage from the droneship always appears perfect seconds before the landings. So it's not simply the fact of being at sea.
To your second question, how about a camera on a boat closer in with a hard line to a boat farther out with the satellite connection? You act as if sending a video feed is an unsolvable problem despite them beaming living video through the rest of the mission when they are in space.
They're not interested in the extra hassle of continuity for the sake of putting on a live show. The droneship has tons of cameras, the booster has tons of telemetry, that's all they're interested in.
(if you must spin a conspiracy, the one where they deliberately don't upgrade to keep their fans guessing is more credible - it's zero effort)
When you mount cameras on a landing barge, you would expect there to be a high likelihood of them being damaged or affected in some way when your rocket lands. So you do the obvious thing, and setup a redundant camera feed somewhere at a distance. Previous test landings at sea had a chase plane. Where was that this time?