#dc#dc comics#batman#bruce wayne#dick grayson#batfam#tim drake#dc fanart#batfamily
seen from China
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from South Korea
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from Italy
seen from Italy
seen from Spain
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
Yeah, ok, it's a touch bold to talk about something being the thing of the year as early as January, but the potential of the web streams API has gotten me all excited. TL;DR: Streams can be used to do fun things like turn clouds to butts, transcode MPEG to GIF, but most importantly, they can be combined with service workers to become the fastest way to serve content.
Five Things to Consider before Broadcasting a Web Stream
Last Sunday, we hosted singer/songwriter Debbie Liske’s live web stream show on Stageit. the production was a success. Here are five things we’ve come to believe as being very important to consider before broadcasting a web stream.
Lighting - If you’ve ever been in a newsroom studio or any other kind of video broadcasting scenario, you know that they are well lit environments. Your web stream should be no different. Good lighting ensures that the folks who tune in can see you and see you well. Cameras operate best in well lit environments. It’s a good idea to have all the lights on in the room from which you are broadcasting. Having some extra pars, cans, and lamps around doesn’t hurt.
Sound - Having well balanced, high fidelity sound is essential for an effective web stream. If people can’t hear what your doing, they will tune out sooner than later. The novelty of a web stream wears off real fast if the sound quality sucks. The built in mic on your web cam or laptop isn’t going to cut it. It’s best to at least have some kind of audio interface with basic mixing capabilities. Being able to balance the components of a performance is absolutely essential.
Bandwidth - Knowing your upload speed is important. This regulates the quality of the video and audio that you send to your viewers. Most stream hosts request a minimum upload speed of 5 Mbps for HD streams. Standard streams need at least 1 Mbps. If your connecting on wifi, fuhgettaboudit. Trying to broadcast at a quality above your upload speed results in stream loss and image locking. Viewers hate that.
Monitoring - How will you control the quality of what’s being sent out? Being able to monitor your sound and picture is essential. If you are a one or two person operation, wearing headphones fed by the output audio is your only option. If you have a sound tech, that person can monitor the audio off screen. Most web streaming servers offer on screen video monitoring. Seeing the video feed is usually as easy as glancing at the screen every now and then.
Picture in Frame - What else is in the view of the camera? Having a clean, unobstructed, staged broadcast platform is a good idea. Make sure that trash, guitar cases, book bags, and anything else you don’t want in frame is well out of the picture. A lot of cabling is required for staging a web stream. Most of this can be at your feet and out of frame.
Do you have any tips for live web streaming? If so, let us know by tweeting us at @twoegrets.
Studio 20 Professor Jay Rosen, Dave Winer and special guest Jeff Jarvis discuss live web search, web sites becoming streams, and Studio 20 on their weekly podcast, Rebooting The News.
Take a listen, and find more links in the show notes.
