Live Streaming

What components do I need?

Getting started is pretty easy. Thanks to platforms like Facebook and YouTube, you can do it with a few clicks from your phone. But that won’t help you much when you want to up your production value. Here is what you need to get started.

To successfully plan your setup, we need to work backwards and follow the old credo of “begin with the end in mind”.

So, the last part of live streaming is “how do I get my video to viewers”? This is normally done through a CDN – a content delivery network. A content delivery network takes your video stream, and not only pushes it out to your legion of fans, but also does things like create lower resolution variants, also called transcoding and transrating. A good CDN also supports different platforms, such as streaming to mobile devices and various computer platforms. A CDN also takes the load off of your streaming machine. Imagine your single CPU being tasked with sending out specific video streams in specific formats for every user?

OK, now that we have our CDN, we need to send a high quality signal to it.   I’ll address the specifics of that later in the episode, but suffice it to say, for a successful broadcast, you’ll need a decent Internet connection with plenty of headroom.

All CDNs will provide you with a protocol – that is, the way in which they want to receive the live feed for your broadcast. Now, this is different than the protocols that your end device will use – as a good CDN will take care of that mumbo jumbo translation for you….but only if you get the video to them in the right format. Film Streaming

These upload streaming formats can include HLS, RTSP, RTMP, and Silverlight formats. The end game is that your software needs to be able to stream to the CDNs mandated format for it to be recognized.

Speaking of software, this is one of the most critical decisions to make.
Will your streaming software ONLY stream, or will it also do production tasks as well, like switching between multiple sources, playing prerecorded video, adding graphics, and more? Of the utmost importance is “does your software support the camera types you’re sending it?”

which leads up to the beginning of your broadcast chain… “what kind of cameras are you using?” Are you using USB cameras? Or, are you using cameras with HDMI or HDSDI outputs? If the latter, then you need an I/O device on your computer which can not only take all of the inputs you want, but also in the frame size and frame rate you want.

You’ll quickly see that the successful technical implementation of a live stream is based on each part playing with the others seamlessly.