Radford University students Logan Porter and James Owens using two laptops, two cameras, a zoom account and a video switcher to mix, record and livestream a fully interactive in-person conference of the Society of Professional Journalists in Roanoke, Virginia April 2022.
Spurred by the Coronavirus pandemic, live streaming and conferencing video has become a mainstay of education, business and entertainment.
It’s fairly easy to take a simple event, point your computer camera at it, and then link to a livestream platform like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo or Twitch TV. But things get trickier as the audience scales up, and as you blend in-person and online audiences, and as expectations rise for production values (eg lighting, clear audio and directed / switched video).
Platforms:
YouTube asks you to register your account for live streaming 24 hours in advance, but unlimited streams are free.
YouTube diagram describing live stream setup. Switchers, mixers and encoders are relatively cheap these days. (See Livestreaming gear pages on this site).
Facebook has made live streaming simple. Navigate to the page, group, profile or event where you want to publish your live stream. Then tap the Live button at the bottom of the post composer. Add a description to your video. You can also tag friends, check in to a location and add a feeling or activity. Tap Start Live Video, then tap Finish when you want to end. One small downside is that the audience must have a Facebook account to see the livestream.
Vimeo – There are a number of serious challenges involved in scaling up an event from several dozen in a classroom-sized group to several hundred in a conference, and Vimeo’s idea with Virtual Events is to make it easier to handle these. They have a ticketing gateway (Eventbright or several others) and a way to display recorded and simultaneous livestreams from a multi-event conference. The event can also be broadcast on multiple streams (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc). See this Vimeo ultimate guide to live streaming.
Twitch.tv – Live streaming service that focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competitions, in addition to offering music broadcasts, creative content, and “in real life” streams. It is operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.
Conferencing software
Conferencing software is designed to broadcast the camera and desktop views of a host computer to a group of other computers connected through the Internet. Sometimes this involves blends of in-person and online in either real time or asynchronous frames.
Wikipedia has a comparison of web conferencing software available. Universities tend to use Zoom for classroom instruction, but software for internal business conferencing or for external professional conferencing are important markets.
Educational and Professional focus
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- Zoom software allows live streaming to a large but non-public audience. Free livestream sessions have short duration and bandwidth. A paid individual account starts around $60 per year.
- Big blue button – Open source conferencing program designed for education
- Skype (Microsoft) for small business and home
Business focus
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- Microsoft Teams for larger scale and longer duration team conferencing (Difference between Skype and MS Teams)
- Atlasian – Team building software allowing full remote collaboration
- BlueJeans Meetings (Verizon ) — provides an interoperable cloud-based video meetings service that connects many users across different devices, platforms and conference programs.
- Webex Meetings (Cisco). Inclusive teamwork across environments, languages, abilities, and personalities.
- GoTo Meeting — Remote monitoring and management for small businesses — online meeting, desktop sharing, and video conferencing software that enables the user to meet with other computer users, customers, clients or colleagues via the Internet in real time.
IT focus – Remote access for repair and maintenance
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- TeamViewer allows remote maintenance and control of other computes.
Presentation via video
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- Prezi – Presentation software with more snap than Powerpoint, now available for video conferencing.
Persistent chat
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- Slack – persistent chat Slack teams allow communities, groups, or teams to join a “workspace” via a specific URL or invitation sent by a team admin or owner. Slack has been adopted as a community platform, replacing message boards or social media groups.
- Discord – voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers” (collection of persistent chat rooms and voice channels which can be accessed via invite links. Works through web browsers in all computer operating systems.
- Huddle, audio first workspace