wirecast Archives - Mainstream | Live Video Agency

Did Telestream Accidentally Create the Industry’s Best Webinar Production Tool?

Nick Bacon — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 15:10:07 +0000

Twitch Con, a conference celebrating the world’s most popular eSports streaming platform, is not the place where you would expect to see the launch of an incredible new webinar production tool. But this past week, that is exactly what happened.

At the event, Telestream launched its new stream production tool. Known as Gameshow, the low-cost tool – a stripped-down, sleeked version of its popular webcasting program, Wirecast – offers the gaming community the ability to create dynamic, interactive, high-quality streams at the bargain-basement price of only $9/month. It’s available for Mac & PC and streams directly to YouTube or Twitch.

Though unintended by Telestream, this tool can be a powerful asset for those who regularly produce webinars.

Webinar producers can learn a lot from the eSports & streaming communities. The two products – webinars and game streams – are structurally very similar.

Both webinars and game streams feature the following:

A screen capture – either a game being played, or a presentation being given
Live view of the presenters (via a USB webcam or full HD camera)
Interactive elements to drive engagement – Q&As, chats, and direct communication between presenter and audience

Besides the compositional similarities, there are similar goals in the positioning of the audience and the presenters. In both cases, presenters seek to be seen as thought leaders in a particular area. The audience sticks the presenter for an extraordinarily long time – Twitch users watch their favorite streams for an average of 109 minutes a day, while a typical webinar will keep a viewer engaged for over 30 minutes. Whether your goal is to distinguish yourself as an expert in generating PR for technology startups or in withstanding a 6-pool zergling rush in Starcraft, your method of attracting and engaging an audience is the same.

Even though Telestream’s “Gameshow” is geared towards streamers, it can also be a vitally useful tool for webinar producers as well. It’s designed from the ground-up to be streamlined into complex workflows: the last thing a gamer wants is to lose valuable clicks-per-minute on a clunky production tool. So production is as simple as possible. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Select Your Template

With one click, select a pre-designed template. You can also build your own.

Step 2: Setup your platform

While Twitch is a great platform for streamers, most webinar producers will find YouTube’s interface much more suited to their goals. Input your username and give your camera and mic access, and Gameshow will prompt you to login to your YouTube account.

Step 3: Customize your broadcast

Gameshow’s user interface is incredibly intuitive – especially if you’ve used Wirecast. Customize each shot with screen /window captures, webcam shots, and a suite of dynamic interactive elements such as image carousels, web displays, social media icons, and more.

Step 4: Go Live

Once you’re all set, click the “Stream” button in the top-left corner. You’ll see a count-up timer start. If you go to your YouTube Live Dashboard it will look like this:

If the light is green, you’re good to go! Scroll down to the bottom of the page and go to the URL to your broadcast. You can then embed in your website as you normally would any YouTube video.

Using these tools to their fullest effect can have an immediate impact on your audience engagement, But there are key differences between the two industries to consider. While Twitch and YouTube are the platforms of choice for streamers, webinar producers have many more options. WebEx, GoToMeeting, WebinarPlatform, and more all exist and share a userbase. Currently, Gameshow only supports YouTube and Twitch, but with a “virtual camera” option, as we see in WireCast, webinar producers would gain access to the platform of their choice.

The other key difference is the “formal”-ness of the presentation: whereas streamers tend to show content off the cuff and in a less structured schedule, webinars tend to feature rehearsed presentations at a very specific pre-appointed time. You have to tune in at the right time and watch an entire webinar in order to get the most out of it; streamers encourage folks to tune in and out as they please, catching a few minutes here and there. You don’t have to watch Naniwa’s entire 8-hour stream to enjoy it; you can watch him rip apart an enemy for one match, crack a couple jokes in the chat, then go on to the next channel.

Webinar producers can learn much from the streaming community. Creating accessible, irreverent, yet high-quality broadcasts would cast a wider net and help create a more focused, engaged audience. Producers should also adopt the filmmaking mantra “show, don’t tell” – rather than deliver a rehearsed pitch, put your presentation into practice and let your audience come along for the ride. If your webinar discusses how to increase sales effectiveness, stream yourself as you call, qualify, and sell your product. If you’re leading an e-class on how to develop an electronic press kit, let them watch as you develop the actual materials in yours.

By adopting some of the tools and ideas from the streaming community, webinar producers can drastically increase their impact and effectiveness. See you at Twitch Con 2016, and if you need help producing your webinar, reach out to us!

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Building a 24/7 Streaming Network: ACRE TV (A Case Study)

Nick Bacon — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 02:03:52 +0000

One of the benefits of running a business with a life-long friend is that, together, we can decide to take on passion projects that strike our curiosity and grow our skill set even if they don’t immediately show a profit. Over the last year and a half much of that “passion project” time has gone into building and running ACRE TV, a 24/7 artist-made livestreaming tele-vision network.

In this post I’m going to attempt to describe ACRE TV for the uninitiated, and lay out some of the components and challenges one might meet when building a 24/7 streaming network. I’ll detail the types of forms we’ve been interested in programming on ACRE TV, and give some specific examples of programs that worked especially well. Finally, I’ll list and briefly describe some of the other artist-made streaming projects we’ve become watchers and fans of in the last two years.

ACRE TV: Artist-Made Tele-Vision

ACRE TV’s logo is adapted from an image found in Jeffery Sconce’s “Haunted Media”. This book details the interesting history of broadcast, and it’s relationship to Spiritualist movements– people who heard and saw the supernatural in the broadcast signal.

The Concept

ACRE TV officially launched on February 15, 2014, but the conceptualizing and planning started more than a year earlier. Back in 2013, Nick and I had the curious challenge of creating a reel to showcase the work we had done, but found that the typical 2-3 minute video form didn’t do justice to our live stream productions. As has been pointed out in studies (see page 11), people watch live streaming video online longer than video-on-demand, at a ratio of almost thirteen to 1. Condensing our multi-hour live stream productions into an edited, short video-on-demand seemed to totally ignore the central appeal of live streaming. Quickly, we wondered what a 24/7 network of our work would look like, where a viewer would be able to see our work in full duration, consciously programmed in a playlist that made sense. Basically, we wondered about creating our very own TV network.

Simultaneously, we were having conversations with two others future ACRE TV co-directors: Kera MacKenzie, and Nicholas Wylie.

Kera and I share a collaborative art practice and had been dreaming of creating an uninterrupted live streaming video signal that evolves over a long period of time (think months). This vision of a signal was partially inspired by driving late night through the Southwest U.S. together, listening to strange AM stations slowly re/dissolve in and out of the static, as our radio’s antenna drifted through their broadcast range. The feeling of these small, strange signals that continue on unabated — even when you aren’t around to hear them — is something that still gives me goose bumps.

Nick Wylie is a friend, collaborator, and also co-founder of ACRE Residency, a vital, volunteer-run organization in the Chicago and US emerging artist scene that has hosted a summer long residency in Southwest Wisconsin for the past five years. ACRE also organizes hundreds of art shows in Chicago and elsewhere every year. Hearing our dream to create a DIY network, Nick W. immediately offered the reputation and network of artists that he and his ACRE collaborators have painstakingly developed.

So, exactly one year ago yesterday, ACRE TV launched with our first program, PLEASE STAND BY.

The Technology

Creating a broadcast network from scratch is technically difficult. After more than three years of focusing on live stream productions, Nick and I had developed a certain expertise in running video streams that lasted up to eight hours, but building a DIY network was a new challenge, requiring an infrastructure capable of indefinite streaming as well as the ability to switch to specific programming at specific times. Initially, we tried using familiar tools, and finally, brought a couple of new ones into our repertoire.

Attempt 1 (The Wirecast Method):

For Please Stand By, we streamed test patterns created by 25 amazing film and video artists. Using a non-linear editing system, we exported these videos into a single ~1.5 hour file and used Wirecast to stream it, looping, to one of our go-to content delivery networks, DaCast. Nick described this method in some detail at the blog on our old company website. This Wirecast method was OK– we were able to get streaming video to our website!– but it had some serious flaws. First, besides the very rudimentary apple script that Nick mentions in the above link, we weren’t able to schedule anything to switch at specific times of the day. Second, because Wirecast isn’t made to run day-long streams, the network was going down almost every other day, leaving us the stressful job of babysitting the stream to restart it when it failed, day and night. Third, this method tied up a computer (generously lent by ACRE) for the entire run of the show.

Attempt 2 (The Wowza Method):

A portion of a stream schedule for Direct Object/Direct Action.

Knowing that the “Wirecast Method” wasn’t sustainable, Nick started looking into the software behind other streaming networks. The solution he came upon is Wowza, server-side streaming video software. Wowza is used by hundreds of businesses and organizations and is the software behind innovative streaming projects like ChatRoulette and Twitch.tv. It has become the backbone for ACRE TV.

To install Wowza we signed up for the free six-month license and rented an Amazon AWS instance. Nick performed some Ubuntu magic to set up the software, and suddenly we had our very own streaming video server. Hopefully Nick will cover Wowza in more detail in a future post, but at a fundamental level Wowza allowed us to create a text-based scheduler that will switch, at specific times, between videos we have uploaded to our server and live events that any of our artists can stream to our very own RTMP address. Also, because Wowza runs directly on the streaming server, it streams perfectly without (almost) ever going down and frees up the ACRE-lent computer.

Additionally, we purchased a license for JW Player that would take the stream and play it back on our website, and the Wowza transcoder that will create multiple bit-rate streaming files automatically to provide a better user-end experience of the stream. By the time we launched our second thematic show, These Streams, we were running ACRE TV off of Wowza.

The Organization and the Artwork

To create a 24/7 artist-made tele-vision network we needed to program many hours of art tele-vision. We, the four co-directors, quickly realized the enormity of the task and gathered a heady group of artists and curators* whose interests somehow overlap with tele-vision. As a group, we decided to structure ACRE TV into two-month programs, each based on a specific theme, while making room for independently themed programming to run throughout the year(s). We also talked at length about the type of work we were hoping to show on ACRE TV that would distinguish it from other traditional film and video festivals or programs. In the end, there are five forms of film/video/performance that we are especially interested in showing. I’ll describe each below and give an example from some of our favorite work that has played, or is currently being played, on ACRE TV.

*ACRE TV is completely volunteer-run. Our operational costs are paid for with generous financial support from the Propeller Fund, ACRE, as well as donations from viewers. You can donate to ACRE TV here.

Canned:

Canned — meaning, having already been finished — video is the source of all video-on-demand and also has a place on a live stream network. We stream canned video on ACRE TV from some of the most interesting contemporary experimental film/video makers (Jodie Mack, Ben Russell, Cauleen Smith, Peter Burr, John Kilduff and on and on) and when we do we try to be very considerate of how the schedule can support it. A good example of time-specific canned video happened in our third show, Psychedelicatessen, in which we programmed work to be shown during specific mealtimes. For instance, Jodie Mack’s “The Future Is Bright“, a gentle piece of devotional cinema, led off our DINNER program like saying,”grace”.

Live:

Stills from Joseph Herring’s Runnel: Episode 1 (30 Min)

Live video is central in our work as Mainstream, as well as on ACRE TV. In one year on ACRE TV we’ve broadcast more than 100 hours of live programming by 10+ artists. One proud example is Joseph Herring‘s RUNNEL, in which the Pensacola FL artist live streamed from his studio at the University of West Florida with a group of student collaborators. RUNNEL is a sci-fi contemplation on contemporary art practice through the lens of LARPed small tailed weasels.

Stills from Joseph Herring’s Runnel: Episode 1 (30 Min)

The livestream form, so positioned for peeks down rabbit-holes, nicely delivered viewers a documentary peephole into the animal world of cultural production. The simultaneous chaos of the sets/costumes and mundanity of the activities (sleeping, grooming, limbo) took advantage of two contrasting connotations of livestream: precariousness and boredom.

Episodic:

Episodic programs work as well on ACRE TV as they do on traditional broadcast networks. In that vein, it’s been it’s been an honor to show “Made Up with Danny Volk“, a generous, accessible art-talk show program hosted by the charming Danny Volk, who interviews, and is made-up by, working contemporary artists in their studios. Appointment tele-vision makes an event out of a new piece.

Durational:

It quickly becomes apparent that the central subject of the live stream is time, and so it’s no surprise that the fourth category of work we’ve found to be most effective is a fourth descriptive for a kind of time. Durational pieces, ones that stretch over long periods, are at home on a live stream because of the relative durability and inexpensive of the live stream form as compared to most film/video exhibition formats. One of the pleasures of durational works is how it uniquely relates to a human body’s sense of chronology. Where a two-minute video can be remembered as almost happening outside of time — like an object, albeit one with a plot or characters or tone — a durational work happens as you happen.

Paul Dickinson, a sound artist who lives in Chicago, created a series of 11 hour audio recordings made in remote areas throughout the upper midwest. For two months on ACRE TV during These Streams, you could go to sleep listening to vibrant recordings of crashing thunderstorms in Northwest Wisconsin and wake up to hear the same rain delicately falling off the trees and know that your body had gone through something equivalent.

Experimental Broadcasts:

Screen grab from broadcast of James N. Kienitz Wilkin’s Public Hearing in Progress on ACRE TV

Experimental can be a catch-all, but in this case I am referring to work that uses the form to try out something new. James N Kienitz Wilkins contacted ACRE TV about the possibility of airing Public Hearing in Progress, a series of 14 eight-hour vhs tape recordings from a security camera, made during the rehearsals and production of his feature length film Public Hearing. The original 16mm film involves the re-performance of a rural American town debating whether to replace a Wal-Mart with a super Wal-Mart. Watching segments of the 100+ hour project you quickly become aware of tedium and collaboration it takes to make a film or a democracy.

Still from Public Hearing by James N. Kienitz Wilkins

To learn more about PHIP, you can read an interview with James via Bomb Magazine, and you can watch Public Hearing, hosted in conjunction with the airing of PHIP, on James’ website.

How to Watch, or Make, ACRE TV

Watch ACRE TV at www.acretv.org

Consult ACRE TV’s schedule here.

You can see our archive, including information on every program played on ACRE TV here.

We post all of our open calls here, and you can apply to make independently themed work here.

We are always looking for tech savvy creative types to help us build on the back-end of ACRE TV. If you know programming and would like to help us build an interface to make stream scheduling more intuitive, contact us here with ACRE TV TECH HELP as the subject.

Other Artist-Made Broadcast Projects That We Like

As much as we like to tell ourselves we are on to something new, it’s satisfying to know that there are lots of contemporary online broadcast artist projects that are doing the good work. Below are some of the ones we’ve discovered. Please check these, and the amazing historical artist broadcast projects that have come before ACRE TV, out:

Acid Rain Production

E.S.P. TV

Field Broadcast

KCHUNG TV

Network Awesome

Performance Proletarians

The Performance Room

Petit Tube

Radius

The Streaming Festival

Superlative TV

Transmission Arts

Vdrome

VisualcontainerTV

Wave Farm

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The Must-Use Tools for Live Stream Production

Nick Bacon — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:05:43 +0000

With innovative products and platforms in the field of live streaming emerging at an exponential rate, it’s tough to keep up with what works, what doesn’t, and what might if it got a little bit more love. With that in mind, we compiled this review of some of our favorite tools of the trade!

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Hardware

Blackmagic Decklink Mini Recorder

Why? Over the last few years, the cost of live stream production has plummeted, largely thanks to technical innovations from companies such as Blackmagic. Gone are the days where complicated switcher setups are required just to perform a simple 2- or 3-camera stream. With HD-SDI and HDMI inputs, the Blackmagic Decklink Mini Recorder is a powerful tool – and at under $150, the price is hard to beat!

Best for: Custom-built live streaming computers (you need to plug it into the PCIe slot on your motherboard)

Not recommended for: Folks streaming from laptops, or who require an output feed from their capture card.

Worth mentioning: Don’t have a PCIe slot? Just get a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle (USB3 or Thunderbolt)!

Runner up: Teradek Bolt Pro

Why? Oftentimes, the most time-consuming and frustrating aspect of live production is running, hiding, and securing the miles and miles of cable necessary to connect all your components. The Teradek Bolt Pro removes the need for big cable runs, and at a reasonable cost (under $2,000) it’s affordable for most production companies.

Best for: events where running cable might be problematic, like live music events; events that require lots of camera movement within a compact space

Not recommended for: long events (the internal battery on the Bolt Pro lasts about an hour, although it has a 0B 302 series LEMO connector for external power); events where line-of-sight between receiver and transmitter may be compromised by structural elements

Worth mentioning: Teradek makes three models of the Bolt Pro: the 300, 600, and 2000 – with the number corresponding to the total range (in feet) of the device.

Software

Wirecast 5

Why? Wirecast is the de facto standard for live streaming software, and has been in the game for a very long time. Wirecast 5 can stream to any live encoding platform with the exception of New Livestream, and offers fully manual control over everything from the resolution to the bit-rate and everything in between. With up to 5 layers of elements, you can create rich, engaging broadcasts very intuitively. You can even pull other RTMP feeds as an input!

Best for: Anyone who wants to produce a live stream on any platform other than New Livestream.

Not recommended for: New Livestream users.

Worth mentioning: 5 had a good run, but was lacking in some key features. Wirecast 6, which came out in November 2014, added pretty much everything Wirecast 5 was missing: playlists, instant replay, a Twitter feed, and better hot keying!

Runner up: Livestream Studio

Why? Okay, we’ll admit it. Livestream Studio is really great live streaming software. Its interface feels like a sexy control room, you can output to any platform you want, and it comes standard with everything that Wirecast was lacking. While it’s a bit of a resource-hog, it’s a fully capable live streaming solution and would make for a smooth transition for anyone coming from the analog broadcast world.

Best for: New Livestream users, broadcast engineers

Not recommended for: Mac users (there’s no Mac version), any computers that aren’t top-of-the-line or custom-built.

Worth mentioning: Unlike Wirecast, Livestream Studio does NOT give you fine control over resolution and bit-rates of your stream. Rather, it comes with several output profiles from which you can choose. Annoyingly, you can’t output a single HD stream.

Camera

Sony EX-1r

Why? This camera is a workhorse. Arriving on the scene in 2009, you still find these cameras in the field everywhere, and for good reason. Its low light capabilities are top-notch, the zoom is nice and smooth, and we’ve never experienced any back focus issues as with other similarly priced camcorders. One of the first cameras to feature dual-slot recording, you could record for an entire day and never even have to switch out cards!

Best for: ENG production, camera rental facilities, press conferences, back-of-the-room event videography

Not recommended for: cinematic production

Worth mentioning: While the EX-1r uses annoying expensive SxS cards, a simple SxS->SDHC adapter allows you to use SD cards! It also pairs well with the Teradek Bolt Pro, as both can run off the same battery for around 3 hours.

Runner up: Panasonic GH2/GH3

Why? The Panasonic GH2 is a phenomenally versatile camera with an excellent community of support, but one of its best features is probably its most overlooked: clean HDMI output. With the ability to give crystal-clear, 1080p, menu-free video from its mini HDMI port, the GH2 is a great camera for folks looking for a simple one-camera HD live streaming setup. The only downside: it won’t output audio, so you’ll need to figure out an alternative method to run audio into your computer.

Best for: Folks looking to upgrade from webcams or consumer camcorders like the Canon Vixia HFS200; b- or c-cam shots.

Worth mentioning: Because quality degrades rapidly over HDMI, you shouldn’t use an HDMI cable longer than 10 feet for any HD broadcast.

Video Streaming Platform

YouTube Live

Why? Another major contributor to the decrease in cost of live streaming, YouTube is the first major platform to offer its services completely free. As of December 2013, any YouTube account in good standing is eligible for live streaming. And it’s free to embed!

Best for: Branding your live content and embedding in your website

Worth mentioning: As discussed in this previous post, be VERY CAREFUL if your broadcast contains any copyrighted music. You might get yanked from the air!

Also worth mentioning: Like other platforms, YouTube Live occasionally struggles with audio and video sync issues if you’re using the x264 codec. We recommend sticking with h.264 for now.

Runner up: DaCast

Why? DaCast is a true white-labelled platform. For an incredibly low cost (about 5-10% of what other platforms charge), you can embed ad-free streams directly into your website. While the analytics are still questionable at best, DaCast is a truly powerful platform at a very attractive price point.

Best for: Regular production of live events with audiences <100

Worth mentioning: While DaCast does have the ability to create multi-bitrate streams, your computer has to output each stream separately. This puts a greater burden on your computer – so be careful!

Also worth mentioning: We really, really would love to see DaCast implement DVR sometime in the near future. Everyone else does it! C’mon, DaCast!

Communication Platform

Twitter

Why? Because of this:

Got a shoutout on @Toontrack live stream of Devin Townsend’s concert today. Indeeeeeed #Ziltoid #toontrackmetalmonth pic.twitter.com/F6nU5JqhIf

— Storyboard Concept (@storybconcept) November 27, 2014

With more platforms adopting Twitter APIs to allow for broadcast integration, Twitter is the go-to way to have a live discussion with a global audience about your event. Bonus points if you’re able to show their tweets on screen!

Best for: Quick interactions with fans, media, or interested parties Worth mentioning: Hashtagging your event and building up a conversation takes time – make sure to engage with your audience regularly before, during, and after your event!

Runner up: Instagram

Ozzie Guillen and his wife on the red carpet. #Emmys2014 #EmmyChicago A photo posted by TV Academy (@chi_natas) on Nov 1, 2014 at 2:38pm PDT

Why? Conversation flows freely on Instagram, where people love to give love. While it might not be the best platform for live audience interaction, it’s a great platform for your fans to interact with one another!

Best for: #Hashtags. #Lots #Of #Hashtags.

Worth mentioning: Don’t forget – you need a smart phone to sign up for Instagram!

So, did we miss anything? Let us know what you think!

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wirecast Archives - Mainstream | Live Video Agency

Did Telestream Accidentally Create the Industry’s Best Webinar Production Tool?

Step 1: Select Your Template

Step 2: Setup your platform

Step 3: Customize your broadcast

Step 4: Go Live

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Building a 24/7 Streaming Network: ACRE TV (A Case Study)

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The Must-Use Tools for Live Stream Production

Want to see more posts like this? Subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll let you know as soon as they’re published!

Hardware

Blackmagic Decklink Mini Recorder

Runner up: Teradek Bolt Pro

Software

Wirecast 5

Runner up: Livestream Studio

Camera

Sony EX-1r

Runner up: Panasonic GH2/GH3

Video Streaming Platform

YouTube Live

Runner up: DaCast

Communication Platform

Twitter

Runner up: Instagram

Congratulations – you’ve reached the end of the article! But that’s not the end of the story. Subscribe below and we’ll keep you up to date!