Anyone can be a live streaming broadcaster

ISE Insights

Anyone can be a live streaming broadcaster

ISE Insights

The ability to stream an event live to reach audiences outside of the venue is among the biggest current business trends.

“Technologies like virtual production and inexpensive cine-style cameras make content creation much more easily available to people who aren't television broadcasters, but what's driven a real acceleration in the convergence of broadcast with AV is the ability to extend delivery of content directly,” says Ciaran Doran, chair of ISE’s AV Broadcast Summit.

Key technologies

What are the key technologies involved in live streaming? A logical starting point is cameras. Video cameras with HDMI outputs are better quality than simple webcams as they use higher-quality lenses and have better low-light sensitivity. Any resolution higher than HD 1080p is probably unnecessary for a live stream. HD picture quality will meet the expectations of most audiences watching online and, importantly, will comfortably fit within your bitrate budget. Going to 4K or beyond will impact the amount of bandwidth you pay for and potentially risk bottlenecks in transmission to the user.

Robotic solutions are popular choices for providing amazing angles (such as aerial wire-cams) and many PTZ options can be ganged together and operated by a single person to maximise that budget.

That said, if you are creating immersive live virtual reality experiences you will need a specialist array of cameras and software to stitch then compress the output.

Think of the production switcher as the engine room of your broadcast. A unit with multiple camera inputs means you can set up camera angles such as wides and close-ups of each person in the performance and simply cut in real time between video sources. You might want to connect up a computer with a PowerPoint slide show or websites and gaming consoles or for insertion of pre-recorded clips.

Built into these consoles are an array of video effects for transitions such as dissolve, or more dramatic effects such as dip to colour. You can add picture in picture with customised positions and backgrounds. There are even stores for titles and graphics that you can load in. For larger-scale productions a dedicated motion graphics engine for rendering 3D logos, real-time animations and augmented reality overlaid on the live video might be an advantage.

Your producers will need to see what they are switching. Depending on the complexity you might only need a couple of monitors or a multi-viewer displaying all inputs.

Going live

Ambitious productions often come with complex signal routing requirements for secondary feeds, on-set monitor displays, audio mixing, clean feed outputs, and more. The more sophisticated production switchers can meet those challenges while reducing dependency on external routing systems. Often it’s a case of just selecting the streaming service you want and pressing the button to go live to a global audience via YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or other social media platform.

If you are going live over the public internet then some means of smoothing your live stream so that frames do not buffer is advisable. Zixi, RIST and SRT are some of the most popular here.

Arguably the only difference between broadcast and corporate use cases is scale - though fashion brands have live streamed events to 200 million viewers. If Taylor Swift were to live stream the last of her Eras tour concerts as pay-per-view it would require as robust a subscriber onboarding process and failsafe content delivery network as any Super Bowl.

The same technology interface and control systems used in high-end broadcast can now unlock more efficient and flexible production for corporate events, keynotes, conferences, and more, all powered by the cloud. Audio and video can be accessed and mixed in exactly the same way via standard computer workstations over the internet from anywhere. Your production team could be in a central facility or even distributed, saving financial and carbon costs on travel.

“The fact is content can be made much more cheaply than ever before,” Doran says. “You no longer need a five-camera setup in a central London location to create content. You can make it look as if it were shot anywhere in the world, you can produce remotely and more flexibly using talent wherever there are.

“You can even create multi-language content cheaper than ever before because you've got voiceover artists available in every corner of the globe working in their local language.”

The whole world of corporates and brands comes alive in the AV Broadcast Zone at ISE 2025.

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ISE is the world-renowned annual tech show for the AV and systems integration industry, taking place in Barcelona, 4-7 February 2025. It will spotlight the latest AV broadcast solutions from leading manufacturers.

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