Stream Your Events Live
Live broadcasting an event has never been easier!
As broadband speeds increase and mobile Internet access expands, a new form of streaming is now possible: live streaming. Over the weekend, I managed all the AV/tech for a friend’s special day with a key component of it being the live broadcast of the event to their relatives overseas.
All that’s needed is a webcam and many laptops have built-in webcams!
With tools such as Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder and one of the many live streaming sites available, it was a cinch to get up and running. Similar to YouTube, the video can be viewed on a specific user’s page/channel or embedded into another website (in this case, their personal website).
Since I was transmitting video, as opposed to watching it, the important factor was the upload speed of the Internet connection. Unfortunately, this is lacking for many personal Internet services. A great tool for testing your Internet connection speed is www.speedtest.net. (It tests your download and upload speeds.)
Your Internet upload speed will determine how much you can transmit. With the 0.8 Mbps connection I had available at the venue, I was able to transmit a 640 x 480 stream (H.264 encoding, 30fps) with stereo sound (MP3, 22Khz, 40 Kbps).
The only issue I ran into was my ultraportable laptop being unable to handle the simultaneous encoding, recording (saved and uploaded to the website afterwards), & broadcasting of higher-resolution streams. If you intend to broadcast higher than 640 x 480, I suggest a 2Ghz Core2Duo or equivalent. My TZ’s Core Solo was unable to handle it while running the other applications I needed for the event.
Other features of these live-streaming sites include chat rooms, Twitter integration and other tools to promote and share your live broadcast. These tools are especially be useful for chatting with friends, hosting live question & answer discussions and many other interactive events.
The sites I tested were:
- LiveStream: http://www.livestream.com/
- UStream: http://www.ustream.tv/
- Justin.tv: http://www.justin.tv/
Try it out today!
Filed Under: Blogging > Entertainment > Found on the Web > Fun > Instant Messaging > My Online Life > Online Video > Social Networking > Web/Tech
Tags: broadcasting, live streaming, streaming, video, Webcam
Livestream is quite easy to set up and get running. If you want to use it for commercial purposes you can upgrade your account and get a white labeled player, access control to your channel, etc. Though if the numbers of viewers grow, it can get expensive.
Then other alternatives might be interesting. Wowza Streaming Server in conjunction with Amazons Cloud Computing (http://www.wowzamedia.com/ec2.html) are a good and cheaper alternative. You only pay for what you need.
Regarding the recording, how was the quality of your video stream with the webcam? I can imagine that it’s not easy to film an event with a webcam which is designed for close and up front face filming. If your event is a scene which is big and a bit farer away you could run into problems. Didn’t you?
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The venue was small, so it wasn’t a big issue.
I used an external webcam with built-in pan/zoom functionality. For higher quality, a camcorder can always be connected through FireWire and used as the source, making use of its zoom, better optics, etc.
I had never use FMLE before and wish that it had saved the raw camera input (which was higher resolution) instead of just saving the stream. The Internet connection (or streaming service) also wasn’t 100% reliable so it would cut out and have to restart the stream.
All in all, it was a good experience/experiment and I look forward to streaming future events.
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