Live Streaming advice revisited

I think if you apprach live streaming with a business plan and have access to clients who are willing to pay for it, it's a totally viable business. Overall, I agree with the caveats mentioned. We are getting a ton of bottom feeders as far as potential customers. We had a YouTube personality who
has 5 million followers approach us, they wanted us to do a very complex live stream DJ set. For free. Because of "exposure". We told him, politely, no thanks. Nobody watching his live stream would look at it and wonder, "Wow, whose doing that live stream, we should hire them to do ours."
We have another whole audience lined up that we are building a marketing plan, website and are shooting demo material for and for this audience, we are talking building sets, doing live stream events and demonstrations, would have full small crews of say 1-3 camera ops, audio mixer and assistant
producer, director. These type shoots will have television-like production values hopefully and we are targeting in the $10k-$50k range and doing recurring segments to help these clients achieve recurring image for their clients. The Zacuto live streams have been a great example of
content that is very professionally produced, looks and sounds great, a good example of a talk show format that was translated to live stream pretty well. It's good to build a portfolio of examples to show clients, even before you have your own demo reel built out. Just so they can see what
the possbilities are.

To me, live stream is not that different than traditional production in that you can do a solo talking head for very little money, or you can spend millions of dollars and do something high end. I don't believe live streaming has to look like a podcast with cameras. Why can't we produce a live stream comedy
special for a big client with A list talent? Why can't we pitch creating high end, cool looking sets and shooting them with 3-6 cameras? All of this, as noted, still costs, but a fraction of what it would for broadcast TV production. On the other side, I see most of the opportunity in live stream isn't the content,
it's building a machine that can drive audience enagagement. It's the marketing, social media, promotional side which is where the action is. I am telling clients these days, "Putting on a show" that looks and sounds great with amazing talent, solid concepts, etc. is not that hard. Building an audience who will
tune in and watch it live AND will come back for replays, that is what's hard. Live streaming for me, is kind of in an amazing moment, as far as the gear and tech. With gear you can literally mostly fit into a single backpack, you can live stream with amazing quality for a few thousand dollars. That's the easy part.
But re-invigorating a medium that has become stale and is looked down on, rightfully so, as mainly for people to sit at their computers to blab at a camera, will be challenging. The quarantine has proven though that if you create some compelling content, you can build a pretty amazing audience very quickly.
The DJ D-Nice phenomena has been a great example of that for me and he's just streaming on IG on his phone. I think there is a ton of opportunity in live streaming to really breakthrough and change the paradigm, you just have to take it somewhere new.
 
Bassman2003 said:
Glad this thread is active because it poses the dichotomy (had to look up the spelling on that one...) we are faced with - Streaming is guaranteed fail for a OMB but the budgets are so often barely enough for video production, let along extra crew for streaming.

The other aspect I do not like is the reality that we are asked to be a broadcast entity for 1/100th of the budget. Let's "play" NBC... All of us have spent our careers leaning how to do video and is there room on out tool kit to be experts in networking and internet technology as well? As Dan states, there will be a lot of opportunity but it is kind of out of my wheelhouse to confidently book higher paying work around the weak link in the chain.

A lot to think about. For me, the end user is showered with awesome media these days. So whatever you create in a livestream better be pretty polished or folks will not be impressed or hold on through it. Plus everybody Zooms now, so that raised the bar from the bottom a bit. More questions than answers...
Click to expand...

It's funny, I had an old client the other day I was pitching a collaboration to mention that, "What's your value proposition over a Zoom or Webex webinar?". For anyone who hasn't seen what's possible with real live streaming versus a video conference call, that's a natural reaction. Just like with normal video production, you had better build a killer demo reel
that SHOWS what's possible. Then they will "get it".
 
Thanks for your input and experience Dan. Your posts are making feel like I am not prepared to excel in this area. I am a video tradesman. I do a lot of different services for small businesses. A lot of those services are based around OMB or up the three people being involved. Streaming puts a strain on that scenario as it appears profitable streaming is more of concept. If I am expected to be an authority on social media and marketing to tie in with the commodity video/streaming then I and many others are toast! Now we get to play Ad agency...
 
Bassman2003 said:
Thanks for your input and experience Dan. Your posts are making feel like I am not prepared to excel in this area. I am a video tradesman. I do a lot of different services for small businesses. A lot of those services are based around OMB or up the three people being involved. Streaming puts a strain on that scenario as it appears profitable streaming is more of concept. If I am expected to be an authority on social media and marketing to tie in with the commodity video/streaming then I and many others are toast! Now we get to play Ad agency...
Click to expand...

We are actually looking for a social media expert with B2B expertise. We don't have that expertise and need it. We interviewed one who seemed to know what they are doing
but their area of specialization was more B2C and with music, bands and rappers, def not the audience we are going for.

Luckily my streaming partner has been doing this for 8-9 years so he has a big body of experience to draw upon. I can only speak for myself, if I hadn't known my friend and his personality and expertise,
I wouldn't have even considered live streaming for me and my production company solo. You really seem to need a team with experts to make the model work. Also, the budgets are criminally low when you consider
the value proposition of what it takes with gear and team members to carry it off at any level that's professional. Our hope is that once we build a body of work, we can illustrate, with results and audience engagement
why a client would want spend tens of thousands of dollars instead of $2k-$3k for a live stream.

It remains to be seen if we can get there, but we are building a reel with lots of celebrities and A list talent on it, we already have a project we live streamed that generated close to a million dollars so I feel like we are
at least on the right track for our product and services to be taken seriously, which will hopefully make us appear too high end to
the bottom feeders and people who want freebies. We can demonstrate a business value proposition that makes financial and business sense. Then I think we have a chance at success.

If it were me, as a solo shooter/OMB, I wouldn't bother with live streaming, the hassle and chance of failure under high pressure and emotional situations is pretty probable. Sad to say, but in certain areas
because quarantine, I've seen some live streamers doing okay streaming funerals and memorial services. Still high pressure and one shot deal, it still has to work or you are done, but I can see weddings and funerals wanting to
stream immediately simply because in most places, we can't have large gatherings of people. We were invited to a close friends wedding in June. The family had to cancel the invite to everyone but family and a few of the bride and grooms closest
friends. They are going to live stream it instead.
 
Sorry stray a little bit but was hoping someone would know how to help me out. I'm creating a livestream on vimeo live using OBS. There are some remote presenters that I need to patch into the OBS. I was hoping that I could give them all access to my vimeo account and start their own streams, then I could somehow use their streams as a source in OBS. It seems like the only way to do this is use an RTMP server solution for OBS. I know others are using skype with a plugin to get presenters into the OBS stream but was hoping to avoid the poor quality from skype. What solutions can people recommend given that I have vimeo live acount and OBS.

Thanks!
 
regarding using Zoom and the copyrighted music that youtube and FB will flag whether you have it cleared or not... All the tutorials I have found so far use Zoom connected to another platform such as youtube or facebook which defeats the reason to use Zoom. Is there a way to use Zoom without using one of those other platforms in conjunction? According to their site, you can have up to 1000 participants
 
firehawk said:
Will one of these paid services work in place of youtube/facebook?

https://www.dacast.com/blog/10-best-live-streaming-platforms-for-pros/
Click to expand...

We use Dacast. We did three different sized streams for a big one on Friday and all three of our Dacast streams failed. We are investigating, don't know why yet and we have used them many times in the past. Our clients website failed when we had 149k viewers too, that could be tied with the Dacast failures
but we know that the Akamai server failed which is why the clients website crashed. Thanksfully we were also streaming to Facebook Live and YouTube Live so we kept most of the audience, although we think we lost some from the crash. Thankfully we didn't get blamed for this as our client was on set with us
and her IT People told her that their website crashed.

Interestingly, our live stream had performances with Dave Matthews and Brian Wilson live from their living rooms, performing some of their most popular songs. No copyright infringement issues from either
live performance, the YouTube and FB copyrighted music algorithms didn't get triggered ;-)
 
firehawk said:
regarding using Zoom and the copyrighted music that youtube and FB will flag whether you have it cleared or not... All the tutorials I have found so far use Zoom connected to another platform such as youtube or facebook which defeats the reason to use Zoom. Is there a way to use Zoom without using one of those other platforms in conjunction? According to their site, you can have up to 1000 participants
Click to expand...

Everyone who watches would need a ZOOM client loaded on their viewing device to participate directly. We install a lot of corporate ZOOM room conference systems.

Magewell capture device or NDI encoder plus OBS Studio (free) or VMIX streaming software ($60 for 1080p60 up to four sources to $700 for 4kUHD unlimited sources),or ZOOM client on a laptop makes a practical low cost solution. We use the Magewell HDMI/SDI to USB3 capture devices quite often.

For private events with limited audience, 50 or less, RTSP multi-cast stream lets viewers log in directly to the streaming encoder URL, no need for streaming service or Zoom. No conflicts over rights.

I'm toying with getting a VIMEO live account, $900/yr, for some personal streaming projects. Vimeo streams can be imbedded on a Youtube channel or social media pages as well as streamed on Vimeo. Single fee, unlimited live streaming, supports revenue generation via rental sales or voluntary tips for creative work.

Definitely prefer a 1Gig wired Ethernet connection over anything wireless. But your venue network ISP needs to provide enough reliable upload bandwidth to handle the outbound streams. Testing network speed ahead of time and shutting down any unnecessary outbound internet traffic is a must. For some public venues that might mean turning off their WiFi service for the duration of the event.
If the venue has an IT support person, they could set up QOS with a dedicated bandwidth reservation on the switch port you connect to. The minimum you need is twice the data rate of the streaming format you use.
Needless to say it this is not something that should be done as a one man band showing up cold for the event. Make arrangements with the venue and test in advance.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1332445-REG/magewell_32040_usb_capture_hdmi_plus.html
 
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Does anyone care to share a notion of how to price live stream as an extra?

A wedding client is asking me how much I would charge to add it on. I'm terrible with pricing.

The situation would be a single-camera slingstudio set-up relying on either ethernet or wi-fi at the venue. I would write into the contract a caveat about livestream failure due to technical issues beyond my control.

The goal is to offer it as cheaply as possible.
 
puredrifting said:
We use Dacast. We did three different sized streams for a big one on Friday and all three of our Dacast streams failed. We are investigating, don't know why yet and we have used them many times in the past. Our clients website failed when we had 149k viewers too, that could be tied with the Dacast failures
but we know that the Akamai server failed which is why the clients website crashed. Thanksfully we were also streaming to Facebook Live and YouTube Live so we kept most of the audience, although we think we lost some from the crash. Thankfully we didn't get blamed for this as our client was on set with us
and her IT People told her that their website crashed.

Interestingly, our live stream had performances with Dave Matthews and Brian Wilson live from their living rooms, performing some of their most popular songs. No copyright infringement issues from either
live performance, the YouTube and FB copyrighted music algorithms didn't get triggered ;-)
Click to expand...

Thank you. I contacted Dacast a few days ago but haven't heard back. It is unclear on their tutorial how the viewers actually watch the stream. I would be using OBS. How/where do the viewers go to see the stream? Do you share a link or what?
 
firehawk said:
Thank you. I contacted Dacast a few days ago but haven't heard back. It is unclear on their tutorial how the viewers actually watch the stream. I would be using OBS. How/where do the viewers go to see the stream? Do you share a link or what?
Click to expand...

We either host our own private webpage on our own website or we post it on the client's website. All depends on if it's a private live stream for a select audience or if it's a public thing like for a fundraiser.
On any given live stream these days, we are streaming usually at three resolutions via Dacast to wherever and for public ones, we are streaming to FB Live and YouTube Live as well.
 
ahalpert said:
Does anyone care to share a notion of how to price live stream as an extra?

A wedding client is asking me how much I would charge to add it on. I'm terrible with pricing.

The situation would be a single-camera slingstudio set-up relying on either ethernet or wi-fi at the venue. I would write into the contract a caveat about livestream failure due to technical issues beyond my control.

The goal is to offer it as cheaply as possible.
Click to expand...

We don't do weddings, but we would be at $1,200.00 for that as an add-on.
 
I'm guessing posting the stream through the clients website introduces yet another variable to the mix. Besides the embedding work , is the speed of the stream now also affected by the speed of the client's web hosting? Or is it somehow passed through?
 
firehawk said:
I'm guessing posting the stream through the clients website introduces yet another variable to the mix. Besides the embedding work , is the speed of the stream now also affected by the speed of the client's web hosting? Or is it somehow passed through?
Click to expand...

From our meetings we been having with various streaming infrastructure companies, it is passed through. Just like if you embed your YouTube video in your webpage, the video stream is coming from YouTubes servers, not yours. Your page is just a frame for it, if you will.
I'm not our webcast engineer but based upon my limited technical knowledge, I would suspect that the clients URL is simply the host for the URL/Link back to the actual video. If too many people try to crowd the clients website, this is exactly what happened to our client
last week, the site can crash. But it wasn't the video that crashed it, it was an overload from 149k people trying to access the webpage at the same time, not the bandwidth from the live streaming that caused it.
 
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