Last time in our ‘Live Streaming: No Fluff’ series we brought you a real-life experience of how Project Manager, Ian Dickson used live streaming across over 12 venues across the UK. This time we look at how you can utilise a company website and Facebook Live to reach a wider audience.

Project Manager: Mathew Jones

Event Type: Facebook Live and company website stream.

1. What were the reasons for using live stream?

To give the chance of a wider audience to view the conference across the world and not just the UK

2. Did it help or hinder the event and how?

This was a seamless process and even now 6 months on from the event new people are still viewing the day conference.

3. How did you stream to two platforms?

By using a number of encoders allowed us to stream to the multiple platforms at the same time.

4. Was it tricky managing what goes out, is there any delay before it is in the public eye forever?

Once all systems are set up and tested it is quite a simple job of monitoring what is going out. We always allocate an additional vision mixer technician to mix just for the stream and not the main show as well. You will have a small delay on what’s going out to each platform. This is due to the amount of processing the feeds go through before going up onto each platform. Still this would only be hundreds of a second these days.

5. What equipment etc was used to make the live stream happen?

I have used a few different systems throughout the years.

6. Were there any issues?

Never any issues when using Universal Live!!

7. Was there any pre-event testing?

Yes. We would always test a number of things before just going live. Internet speeds, delay factors, and video quality etc.

8. What’s your opinion on live streaming?

I haven’t really had any issues using any platforms really. It’s all about planning before the event and testing the key elements of the streams before.

9. What in your opinion, is the best platform to use when live streaming?

Again I haven’t had any issues, to be honest. Whether Facebook live, onto websites, youtube. They are all very stable these days.

10. Are there many differences between live stream for public and live stream for private internal-only events?

I would say no not really.

Next time we will look at how Richard Hart used live stream via Skype for business from the UK pharmaceutical conference to its members back in the USA.