Yardwork
I was introduced to a new platform for World Interaction Design Day (IxDD). While attendees viewed our stream on Vimeo, we were producing it in StreamYard.
While it is only fully functional in Chrome, I must say they’ve done an exquisite job designing the tool. It’s intended for managing a stream with multiple people speaking and screen sharing. It makes it really simple to swap people in and out of the stream, to change who is given prominence, and to adjust views with combinations of speakers and slides. Most changes are made with a single click, and elements in the stream can be rearranged by dragging them. It’s pretty amazing what they’ve accomplished in a web browser. The interaction is “smooth as butter.”
It’s also quite simple to switch to video bumpers and interstitial overlays, pop up banners, and swap the background. It was perfect for running a block of talks followed by a Q&A with a moderator and all the speakers.
I can tell you now from experience that you should have more than one person managing a stream if it’s going to be as complex a production as ours. As easy as StreamYard is to use, I had way too many plates to keep spinning. If you are going to be doing any speaking on the stream, you should let someone else manage it. I was prepping the upcoming speaker, watching time and adjusting the stream for the current speaker, communicating with my team in multiple Slack channels, and communicating with other upcoming speakers via my phone.
I do have a few feature requests for StreamYard.
Allow for audio communication between people who are backstage. I know this is tricky—you don’t want to accidentally speak on the stream—but it would be so much easier than having to type to them in the private chat or through some other means altogether.
Don’t automatically send a screen share to the stream. Just because I’m managing the stream doesn’t mean I want my screen to take over when I share it. I want to be able to get it ready while something else is up, just like the guests.
Default to sharing audio with a screen share. I was showing a video on my stream without audio for over a minute because I forgot to check the tiny little box at the bottom of the sharing dialog. I heard the audio just fine and had no idea there was a problem until one of my speakers texted me on my phone.
