Video: Facebook Live Rules to Live By

In this excerpt from his presentation at Live Streaming Summit, Jan Ozer looks at the complications producers and organizations face when trying to stream to Facebook Live and other platforms simultaneously due to rules imposed by Facebook.

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Read the transcript of this clip:

Jan Ozer: Most people want to stream to Facebook Live. It's a wonderful platform, so I think everybody wants to address that, and you want to address it as easily as possible. What a lot of the tools that we’ve looked at had developed is the ability to log in to your Facebook Live account, and that handles all the handshakes so you don't have to worry about things like copying, pasting to the right server, copying and pasting the stream name, or any of that stuff.

The problem is, if you use that live API in any product, you can't use another API for another service according to the rules that Facebook imposes on the people who write to their APIs. So Facebook is being a 500-pound gorilla and saying if you want to use a preset, to stream directly to Facebook Live you can't use a preset to stream to YouTube or stream to any other service.

All of the products here have that limitation. So life would be really simple if you could just use the preset to get to YouTube, use the preset to get Ustream, use the preset to get Facebook Live, but none of the products can do it because you would be breaking your agreement with Facebook.

How do you get around that? You use custom RTMP settings for other services or for Facebook Live. It's not quite as convenient, and you may lose some features, you may lose the ability to monitor just effectively and check the stats that are coming in, but you can do it with all these products. You can also say, “Well, I use the preset for Facebook Live, then I'll use the RTMP for Wowza or for YouTube or for Ustream, or any other service.” Again, every product has that limitation, so I just wanted to mention that up front.