6 Live Streaming Tips & Tricks to Improve Your Live Video Stream

Live streaming has seeped through the barriers of bandwidth inconsistencies to capture a major share of branding and bond-creating gimmicks. It has become the norm for influencers, business circles, and brand inaugurations. Personal events such as marriages, parties too are being live streamed by normal folks who wish to share their joyous moments with their peers. With such high demand for live streaming video on demand, there is no room for technical hindrances that can interfere while streaming live. In this article, let’s discuss some factors that make sure your live streams runs without any glitches

1. Plan Before You Leap

Proper planning embarks the starting point of a fruitful event. Checking for the bandwidth you’re going to stream in, the lighting, climate of the premises, all play a crucial part in the quality of your stream. Putting in the groundwork pays off while going live. There are options given by big live streaming platforms to schedule your streaming with pre-defined settings at a given time. This format cuts down human errors to a great extent, keeping every factor that influences streaming on the check. In many cases, there are requirements to cast streams to OTT platform apps such as Chromecast, Apple TV App, etc., If your audience is inclined to such streaming, make sure you are equipped enough to provide them with such elements by choosing appropriate back-end technologies.

2. Leave No Space for Errors

A simple test prior to your real-time streaming goes a long way to save you from any kind of technical mishaps. What may be picture perfect on books, might be highly flawed in real. Save yourselves from the embarrassment of not knowing where you’re going wrong with a simple check. There are multiple live video streaming techniques these streams can be checked. These methods ensure your software is up-to-date, ultimately making the stream be its best version.

3. Be informed of the BTS:

Being well-informed of the technicalities that keep your stream up and running fail-proofs your video live streaming. There are multiple options provided by real-time streaming apps and websites that allow the streamer to choose the resolution, frame rate Keyframe frequency, Audio coding, and bitrate encoding specifications. These encoders also come with a predefined set of recommendations that would best for streaming. There are multiple streaming solutions available in the market to build video streaming solution to stream live & on demand content seamlessly across devices

Multi-Bitrate Streaming:

Live streaming to a large crowd calls in for diversity. Here’s where Adaptive bitrate streaming comes as the holy grail for all streamers. What exactly is Adaptive bitrate streaming? When you record a video on your device, it gets encoded and transcoded on your choice of cloud or personalized server to the resolution of your choice, and gets transmitted to your viewers’ devices. Here, you can choose a single subset or multiple subsets (industry standard presets – 144p, 240p, 360p, 720p, 1800p, and 4k) in which your video gets transcoded into. This ensures that people streaming your video in low bandwidth also get to see your content without buffering. Though a common feature in video on demand platforms, this is groundbreaking in live streaming, as the transcoding takes place on the instant. In order to avail this feature, choose live streaming solution that offer to build your own live streaming platforms.

4. Your Player Matters

Video player plays a pivotal role in live streaming videos. Video players are also the deciding factor in what file formats are accepted into the stream. A good video player that is suited for live streaming is expected to support all media codecs and media containers. Though the commonly used player for live streams are HTML5 video players, there are advanced players such as HLS in the market that promises HD live streaming with near to zero data loss. Video players are also responsible for making your streaming adaptive on all OS systems. Though this is a common feature in all players at present, make sure your player is adaptable for hardware decoding on all major platforms.

AES256 Encryption

In case you are streaming data that requires security, you can opt for AES256 encryption that encrypts your data into decryptable text files during transmission. By this, there can be no tapping or leakage of your data. Moreover, you can also choose the long key size your data gets encrypted in (128, 192 or 256-bits).

5. Deliver your Content in Style

Content Delivery Network serves as the nervous system to the entire live streaming affair. On the base level, opting for a CDN that guarantees good performance by providing low latency is the pledge everyone swears by. But there’s more to CDN than just ensuring low latency delivery. A good CDN by books also offers the advantage to SEO optimize your content without affecting the speed of the delivery. This single factor beats down all the traditional web hosts to defeat. In many instances, live streaming doesn’t end with videos. They might require auxiliary integrations to captivate the viewers through enticing content. Based on the nature of your content, you can choose from a wide range of integrations such as WordPress. Linking your web pages, landing pages also result in an increase in sales/conversion rates. In addition, Content Delivery Networks are also very affordable than perceived.

6. The Young Age Calls to Engage

There are multiple ways to engage with your viewers through live streaming vs vod. These are not just mere fun pieces but are sessions that up the excitement quotient in your content, making it more viewable and in turn increasing the engagement rates. The smallest preparations such as choosing an appropriate time make a great difference in viewer count. Accelerating your engagement starts even before your streaming session starts. By promoting your live streaming, the content gets more visible to a larger audience. So does collaborations with personalities of your audience’s interest. In addition, simple approaches such as pushing your viewers to comment on your video their favorite part and picking the most trending topics at the moment make a lot of difference.

To Knock it off

Live streaming is the new age paper-print, but with not-so-clear instructions to take it to the heights. Just like any traditional marketing medium, what matters the most is the content that is taken to the consumer’s eyes. Although, the above techniques are some of the proven approaches to make any live streaming a successful one. Make sure you tick all the above boxes before you go live.