AOL Offers Best Practices for Live Streaming
The good news about live streaming video is that companies can now pull off an event at any budget. At the recent Streaming Media West conference, Dylan Armajani, a live streaming specialist with AOL, told the audience what his team could do when money wasn't a concern.
"Probably about two months ago we did a live stream of an Alicia Keys concert, live from the Beacon Theater. It was in partnership with Vevo, and I think for us that kind of demonstrates probably the best we could possibly do in terms of redundancy and really making sure we knew what we were doing," said Armajani.
For the Keys concert, AOL streamed live 1080p video, using a satellite truck to send the signal to Los Angels, and fiber lines to stream back to their New York offices. Since the team was working with a new sponsor, they wanted to make sure nothing went wrong: video-on-demand files were encoded on the truck, as well as at each transmission endpoint. In the end, the event went flawlessly.
"As far as what we do, that kind of demonstrates the best, the high end. When you give us any budget, that's what we can do," noted Armajani. He then showed the audience a video montage of other live AOL streams, many done with far smaller budgets.
"No matter what your budget is, you can do something," Armajani said. He recommended LiveU's backpack systems for streaming live on a budget.
"We recently started using a LiveU pack a lot, and it's not perfect -- sometimes the stream breaks -- but it's really cheap and you can basically go anywhere with it. A satellite truck might cost you 20 grand for the day; this'll cost you two grand to rent for the week or two grand per month if you're going to sign one for the year," said Armajani. He uses it to send a signal back to his studio, then broadcasts it with a Cisco Media Encoder Processor.
For more live streaming tips, watch the full presentation:
Best Practices for Live Streaming
Producers are taking advantage of new technologies, workflows, and production methods to create successful live events. This session discusses the entire webcasting workflow, including how to get the video signal from the site to end user; how to build an audience; when to use multibitrate streaming; strategies to consider for reaching mobile devices, and how to leverage social media platforms. Presenters in this session are the ones in the trenches, producing some of the live events you see on the web today.
Moderator: Jon Orlin, Executive Producer, TechCrunch
Speaker: Dylan Armajani, Live Streaming Specialist, AOL
Speaker: Alden Fertig, Product Manager, Broadcasting, Ustream
Speaker: Adam Schneider, Live Event Producer
Speaker: Victor Borachuk, Executive Producer, Director
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