How to live stream events
I talked in previous posts about our work with the European Conference on Educational Research to ‘amplify’ the conference, recently held in Vienna. This involved setting up various social media channels including a Twitter stream and a iTunesU page, producing a series of video interviews with conveners of the different networks which organise ECER and b9radcasting three live radio shows from the conference.
We also undertook to stream four keynote speeches, run in two parallel sessions as well as the opening. Easy, I thought. Like many of you I have live streamed from different events, pointing a camera or even a MacBook at the speaker and linking in to uStream or Justin.tv or one of the other social video platforms. It turned out not to be so simple.
We were working with a community not generally used to social media. And quite simply, the idea of pointing them to a platform advertising poker, acne treatments didn’t seem a good idea. Plus we had an issue with the reliability and quality of the free services. Livestream looked a better idea especially though their premium accounts. This allows you to have your own channel and remove the adverts.but a single channel on Livestream costs 350 dollars a month, with twelve months billing in advance. And we needed two channels. Back to the drawing board. We discovered that Ustream has set up another service called Watershed and indeed for a time were tempted by this. Watershed offers per view payments, but the prices are relatively high. And the terms and conditions of service for the monthly or annual contracts was impenetrable. No problem, we thought, we will ring them and clarify the conditions. Then we discovered there was no telephone number on their site. All you cold do was ask questions on a bulletin board, largely filled with complaints about the service and the total lack of technical support.
OK – so that didn’t seem such a good idea. Last resort – ask a friend. I twittered out for anyone with ideas of a service we could use. And somewhat to my surprise, no-one could come up with a solution, other than the services we had already looked at.
Back to searching on the Internet. Of course there are many companies offering professional streaming services but they all seem geared towards corporate or media organisations, not towards education or for relatively low numbers of live viewers.
I finally stumbled on a web site from a Canadian company called NetroMedia. Their prices were not clear but they said that for one off events you could fill in a query form. So I did, not with any great hope. To my surprise about half an hour later, I had an email reply asking for more details about the event I wished to stream. And to my even greater surprise, some forty minutes after returning this a person rang me. Yes, a real live person!!!
She calculated how much bandwidth we would need and offered us a service for 100 Canadian dollars, plus 20 dollars for unlimited technical support. (Note that if you buy into this or a similar service, it is important to buy sufficient bandwidth in advance, extra bandwidth per view is relatively expensive). Woo, away we go. Even better some twenty minutes after paying them, Darren, the technical support man rung us. This was very helpful, because although the set up is relatively simple, we required two video streams going out simultaneously, and that required a little fiddling.
NetroMedia do not offer a portal for streams. Instead they provide a streaming service and you embed a Flash video player in your own web site. This suited us just fine. The up stream was encoded through the free Adobe Flash Media Encoder, which worked well on both a PC and a Mac. The only thing I would like is to have more direction control over what we were streaming – e.g to be able to switch between a feed from the data projector and the video but I am sure we can work out how to do that. I am very happy with the quality of the streaming (you can view the recordings by clicking on read more on each of the channels on the ECER video streaming web page) although we were helped in this regard by the kind loan from Helsinki University of two very good video cameras.
Of course, if you are working in a University or large organisation, you may be able to run your own streaming server.But such an investment is beyond Pontydysgu, or I guess many small organisations. Yet video streaming is going to be an important part of Amplifying future events. And we need a reliable and reasonable quality of service. I would certainly go to Netromedia again. But I also wonder if there is some way we could collectively organise resources for streaming in the educational technology community to both share know-how and expertise and infrastructure.
Graham,
Thanks for this clear write up of what you went through to stream the events. I did video from a conference awhile back and here is a suggestion for the future. Instead of streaming the speech, I had the presenters come to a separate hotel room that I set up in a TV talk show style. We had a stream out with text chat participation. I interviewed the presenter to bring out the key point of their actual presentation and we took text chat questions live. We had a laptop on the table between us so we could see the questions coming in. It gave the session a more intimate feel. We actually had more people online than we did at the live event. Only issue was a spotty network connection at times.
Best regards,
Chris
Hi Chris – you are anticipating my next article around this. Think we need to look at what we are broadcasting out and especially the back channels. Like your format.
I myself mostly use http://www.tvmad.com because it’s probably the most user-friendly and simple to use.
Of course everyone has their own favorites
Cheers,
Martin
Dear Graham,
I read your very interesting post on “how to live stream events” and you are definitely in favor or buying extra bandwidth from a streaming service provider.
We’ll be using Elluminate for a live streaming event (vClass, up to 300 persons connected online, which is very robust) and the event will be debate (with 2 cameras filming).
What are the questions we have to ask ourselves whether we need or not extra bandwidth?
In your case, which was the bandwidth you had to which you added more (and how much?)
Hi Katerina
That’s an interesting question. Firstly I am no expert on bandwidth requirements. But, assuming you are running your own Elluminate server, the recommendations are that you have about 1Mbps of outbound bandwidth per 25 simultaneous users, although you may be able to get away with less than that. As I understand it – according to how your server is set up – if you start running short of bandwidth, Elluminate will slow down!
But more interesting is why you are using Elluminate in the first place. I have seen quite a few conferences recently using Elluminate to ‘stream’ events but am not at all convinced about it. Elluminate is designed as a virtual classroom and not for streaming. Indeed one reason that Elluminate has relatively low bandwidth requirements are because of the limitations in its video capability. And although it is possible to save Elluminate recordings and offer them for subsequent feedback, I am not convinced of the user experience.
Much better for streaming I think is to buy in bandwidth and use a proper streaming window on your own web site. Adobe provides free software to do this. Of course you will want some way of providing opportunities for your remote audience to participate. Here I think you have two options. One is via twitter using an # hashtag and displaying a twitter wall on the web site alongside the video. And a Jisc project has, I think, recently released an open source tool allowing you to synchronise video and tweets for playback.
Although that is trendy I can’t help thinking the good old fashioned chat box is still the best way of doing it. Depending on what software your website uses there are several different options, some of which are free. One thing I would watch for though, is to make sure you are able to save the chat for later use. The other thing is to have a good chat moderator both to help the discussion and to bring questions to the attention of the speakers.
Another issue at them moment is around projecting a backchannel to the face to face audience. At the Alt conference in Nottingham two weeks ago, Alt seemingly turned the twitterfall back channel off during keynote presentations. After delegate pressure (via Twitter!!) this was put to a vote during the final session and delegates overwhelmingly voted that the back channel should be projected at next years conference.
Thanks a million for your feedback, Graham.
We R we using a video conferencing tool to live stream a debate? Very good question! I wish I have asked you buying the licence…