Experts Offer Best Practices for Live Video Streaming
At the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, a panel of live production experts offered tips from their years of experience. The importance of testing, for example, can't be overstated.
"Test your bandwidth. Very, very important," offered Andrew Lipson, vice president of operations for Synaptic Digital.
"Test everything," asserted Mitch Jacobson, the author of Mastering MultiCamera Techniques. Do a dry run ahead of time and work out the bugs, he said.
Returning to bandwidth, Lipson told how problems could creep in at the last minute if bandwidth wasn't planned out carefully.
"Dedicated bandwidth is really, really important. It's one thing to say 'We can give you a T1 line' or 'You can get on our connectivity, it's all great.' It's not great once the rest of the people start using the network," Lipson said. "Make sure that you try to at least partition your bandwidth or make sure that you're testing at the same time you're going to broadcast so you know what the real-world environment is going to be before you hit Stream."
Is 4G wireless strong enough for live video streaming?, a member of the audience asked.
"It actually can work pretty well. You just have to make sure you're not trying to go with 500kb or higher if you're trying to do it over a 4G," Lipson said.
Jacobson wouldn't make 4G his first choice, but said that it's an acceptable fallback: "Mostly I use it as a backup," he said. "It's in my bag of tricks in case something may go wrong with the hard line. It's nice to have some of these options like the Teradek Cube or 4G just in case."
For much more advice on streaming live video, watch the full session below.
A201: Best Practices For Live Streaming Production
This session will discuss tips and tricks, best practices, and lessons learned regarding the technical setup of live streaming production. Learn how to stream multiple formats from a single encoder, use social networking overlays, leverage adaptive bitrate streaming, and transition between live streams from multiple camera angles using multi-encoder synchronization. Speakers in this session are the ones in the trenches, producing some of the largest live events you see on the web today.
Moderator: Philip Nelson, Senior VP, Artist and Media Relations, NewTek
Speaker: Kathryn Jones, CEO, Virtual Arts TV
Speaker: Erin Bigelow, Technical Director, St. John's University
Speaker: Andrew Lipson, VP, Operations, Synaptic Digital
Speaker: Mitch Jacobson, Author, Mastering MultiCamera Techniques
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