It’s 6:55 p.m. Three hundred people are expected in the room, forty others are stuck on a train, and your CEO is rehearsing their speech in front of a crackling microphone. On an evening like this, live streaming is not a gimmick: it’s what lets those who aren’t there be in the room anyway.
But live streaming can’t be improvised. Here is how to decide, prepare and get the most out of your live broadcast.
When live is really worth it
A live stream makes sense when the moment matters as much as the content: people want to watch, react, ask a question. A few situations where it hits the mark:
- The general assembly: your remote members, shareholders or supporters can follow the proceedings. Be careful, the rules on remote voting depend on your statutes and your legal form: check them before promising anything.
- The conference or launch: the announcement effect is shared widely, far beyond the room.
- The hybrid webinar: part of the audience on site, the other behind their screen, with questions flowing between the two.
Conversely, if nobody has any questions to ask and the message is very scripted, an edited video will be more effective than a live stream. Live is made for the moment, not for perfection.
What live demands technically
Viewers forgive a slightly simple picture. They forgive neither cut-out sound nor a frozen image. Hence the order of priorities:
- Sound first. Lavalier mics for the speakers, a handheld mic for questions from the room, and someone monitoring the levels continuously.
- Several cameras. A wide shot, a tight shot on the speaker, a shot of the room. A production desk (the station where you choose live which camera goes to air) alternates the angles and adds the titles and logos.
- A wired connection. A network cable plugged in, not Wi-Fi shared with three hundred smartphones. And above all, look at the upload speed: this is the speed at which your connection sends data to the internet, often much lower than the download speed shown in offers.
- A suitable platform. YouTube, LinkedIn Live, Vimeo, or a private page on your website depending on whether the event is public or restricted.
To give an order of magnitude, YouTube’s help pages indicate, for a 1080p stream at 30 frames per second, an encoding bitrate between 5 and 14 Mbps in H.264, with 128 kbps stereo sound and a keyframe every 2 seconds. YouTube also advises running an upload speed test before going live. Above all, remember that you need a connection considerably wider than the stream itself, to keep a margin if the network fluctuates.
Tip On YouTube, you choose the latency, that is, the delay between the room and the screen. With low latency, most viewers are under 10 seconds behind; with ultra-low, under 5 seconds, but with a greater risk of stuttering. For a conference with no interaction with the audience, normal latency, the most stable, is more than enough.
The hour-by-hour plan
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| A few weeks before | Choose the platform, define the number of cameras, scout the venue and its connection, let the speakers know they will be filmed |
| One week before | Technical rehearsal, upload speed test, backup plan approved, registration page or streaming link published |
| On the day, 2 hours before | Setup, sound checks, camera positioning, test of a full stream |
| 30 minutes before | Open the live stream with a waiting screen, final check of sound and titles |
| During | Production desk, monitoring of sound and stream, moderation of questions |
| After | Backup of the raw footage, edited replay, short clips, thanks to participants |
The backup plan, or how to sleep the night before
A live stream without a backup plan is a gamble. A few simple habits:
- A second connection (another provider, a dedicated 4G or 5G router) ready to take over.
- A local recording of all the shots, to deliver a clean replay even if the live stream had hiccups.
- A holding message ready to go on screen, and a person in charge of communicating with viewers if there’s a problem.
- A technical rehearsal in the room, with the same cables and the same connection as on the day.
The replay: the live stream’s second life
On YouTube, a live stream is automatically kept as a video on your channel. Handy, but it’s only a rough draft. With the camera recordings, we can produce a clean replay: start and end trimmed, silences cut, sound reworked, chapters, subtitles. We also pull short clips from it: the CEO’s strong line, the product demo, the most applauded answer. A single event can feed your social media for weeks.
To make all this work without stress, at that dog we prepare the setup with you in advance: how many cameras, what sound, what connection, what fallback plan. We also capture events to produce a film and clips from them (see our article on event filming). You focus on your guests, we focus on picture and sound.
An event to broadcast?
Let’s talk about your next live stream: format, venue, audience, and what you want to keep afterwards.
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