So you’re looking for a live streaming service. Type that into an LLM and you’ll probably wind up with a lot of different answers, and chances are, you might have more questions than before you searched. Is a streaming service something you subscribe to in order to watch the new hit series? Or is it a service that you can sign up for to put your content online for others to watch? Does it merely house archived content or does it enable you to stream live natively within the platform?
Getting to the bottom of all this is what this blog is all about. It’s intended to cut through the noise and outline the core pillars that every modern and relevant live streaming service should be able to offer you. From technical workflows to user facing functionality, we hope you find this step by step guide useful as you press on in your search to find the right live stream service for your specific needs and use case.
Let’s get into it.
Hosting
Encoding
Distribution
Presentation
Support
Advanced Functionality
Final Thoughts
Though we often think about live streaming as a finished product that’s experienced by the viewer, streaming is ultimately about data. I know, that may not seem like the most exciting thing in the world. It is, however, extremely important to understand from a foundational level. In over a decade of experience in the streaming industry, however, I’ve personally found that the best way to illustrate how streaming handles data transport is to start with a common story that many people have experienced, at least in some form.
Imagine that you’re a proud parent of a newborn, and you record a 3 minute video of your baby to send to your friends and family. You first try to send the high quality video on a text thread, but your messenger app flags the content as too large to send. Since your video is in the cloud, you decide to next open your laptop and email the file to your friends. Next, you notice that before you can click send, the video has a slow loading bar that takes about a minute to prepare the full file. Your friends, upon receiving the video file, are now required to download it, and depending on their download speed, it may take another minute or two before they’re able to actually watch the video. All this for a short video of a baby drooling and making a half-smile at the very end?
This common story shows that high quality video data is so much larger than we often realize. And if a 3 minute video needs a few minutes to upload, send, and then download before someone can view it, then how much harder is it to live stream a 90 minute HD event without any quality loss or buffering? That’s the challenge of live streaming that it’s easy to underestimate as we live in a world where we now expect every piece of technology to simply “just work.”
Getting even more specific, when your event goes live, imagine a fire hydrant being opened. Except, instead of water shooting out of it, it’s audio and video data. And as long as your event is live, that data just keeps coming. And if you’re lucky and you have a growing audience of viewers throughout the event, your stream has to deliver that data to even more places. Furthermore, when your event is over, you’ll still need to store all of the stream’s data for viewers to watch after the fact, as well. Overall, this isn’t a small task, and it can’t be accomplished with flimsy and unreliable technology.
All of this is why every professional live stream service is built upon a solid foundation of adaptive and scalable hosting. Every video and audio file and every viewer needs space online. This is fundamentally why live streaming services aren’t free, because all of this data hosting and storage needs a place to live. Without top-tier hosting, the integrity of your live stream and the experience of your viewer base won’t be able to hold up over the long haul.
Think of hosting like an apartment or house on the day of a holiday where a large family will gather together. When all of the grandparents, parents, kids, and pets all cram into a single space, is it big enough to comfortably fit everyone together for the big event? You can’t, after all, feed a family of 50 when you only have a kitchen table that maxes out at 4.
Next, let’s look at your streaming data from a different perspective. Audio and video equipment capture images and sounds in a raw format. In order to send them over the internet, you can’t just keep them in their native “language.” Anything that travels over the internet needs to be written in a digital format. And since there’s such an enormous amount of data needed to be sent in real time, that coding needs to be done by a machine that is specifically designed to do the job, called an encoder.
Now, encoders typically come in two different varieties: hardware and software. And though there are strengths to both, there is a clear winner for almost every live streaming context.
Software encoders are somewhere between the 50th or 100th skill added to your computer, and I’m speaking generally, of course. That computer has an operating system, a web browser, media players, productivity programs, conferencing software, a gaming platform for nights and weekends, and more. In other words, once you add a software streaming encoder to the mix, you’re asking your device to multitask even more than it did before. Additionally, on the days that you stream, you’re asking it to spend a majority of its resources during live events to encode raw incoming audio and video data.
Hardware encoders take a different approach, one that’s much simpler and straightforward. Whether they’re the size of your smartphone or fit nicely into an equipment rack, each encoder was designed to do one thing and do it well; encode live stream data. This singular focus and custom built hardware for the job at hand makes it a clear leader in almost every live broadcasting context, though, it’s important to add the caveat that not every streaming encoder is built the same.
When you travel from the United States to most foreign countries, you need to exchange your currency for that of the country you’re traveling to. Except, when you travel, you likely only need to do that once. In encoding, every data packet has to go through the exchange process, to turn the data from a raw format to an optimized digital format, ready for advanced online transfer.
Data hosting and encoding are technical in nature, but distribution is where things really get tricky for live streaming. If not handled carefully and thoughtfully, your stream will have a lower chance at actually looking and sounding the way you want it to your viewers. Here are a number of aspects of streaming distribution that are worth knowing and paying attention to as you pick a provider.
Will your streaming service keep your data the same size, or will it compress it to make it smaller? If you do compress it, at what rate? As video quality has improved over the years, better and better compression has become available. H.264, also known as AVC, was released in 2003 back when 480p SD video was the online standard and 720p and 1080p were emerging. A decade later, H.265, or HEVC, came out when 1080p was the online standard, and 4K was starting to emerge. In 2020, H.266, or VVC, came out as 4K content started coming out a bit more for major new shows and films. Overall, as the data has gotten bigger, better and better compression has come out to help ensure that the data never gets too big to move efficiently for real time tasks like live video streaming.
What quality video and audio can your service stream? And what frame rate will you broadcast? Higher qualities, as mentioned above, will mean more data, which will require more network bandwidth. Additionally, will your provider stream only one quality to your viewers, or will it allow you to transcode your content into various quality levels for your viewers? If so, will it transcode into different quality levels via your network (which puts an even greater stress on your network) or will you accomplish this at the cloud level?
What will your service do when data is unfortunately lost? Some providers utilize TCP which buffers your video until all data arrives, but unfortunately, leaves your viewers with a spinning wheel of death until all packets are ready for them to view. Others take a UDP approach, which keeps your stream going, though missing data will give your viewers a degraded experience. A little missing data won’t hurt much, but if something happens that causes significant packet loss, your stream will look terrible. Others will incorporate Forward Error Correction, which always proactively sends extra packets along that are likely to be lost, so that data retransmission is often not needed. In all likelihood something will go wrong with your stream, and you’ll want to know the redistribution strategy your service provides.
When your available network speed suddenly drops, what will your streaming service do? Does it continue to send an ultra HD video bitrate, even though your network can no longer support it without dropping packets? Or instead, does it use link quality adjustment to automatically adapt the video bitrate to match the available bandwidth, keeping your stream going, albeit at a lower quality, until regular network conditions resume?
What locations will your streaming service allow you to send to? Websites, social media platforms, your organization’s app, multi-site players for overflow rooms and remote campuses, or perhaps even custom OTT apps that mirror the likes of Netflix and Disney+? Every service is different, and you’ll want to approach them with a specific list of destinations to see (1) if streaming to these destinations is doable and (2) how easy streaming regularly to these destinations actually is.
Imagine a “cook-off” between two kitchens and culinary teams. One is a professional kitchen with a Michelin star chef while the other is a fast food kitchen that staffs a few new hires to the industry. Distribution in streaming is similar in that a strategy with more professional functions will always output a different strategy that cuts corners or uses less than ideal processes.
We finally arrive at your end viewers, and how your live streaming service will present your content to them. Note that some of this will slightly overlap with items that we’ve already discussed on the distribution side of things. Overall, though, this section will present a bit more nuance that needs to be considered.
First, is your content gated by a subscription with payment, or perhaps even by a requirement for user account creation? Though this is somewhat rare, some providers to gate content, though most live stream services allow you to present your stream in an open format for anyone to access.
Next, you’ll want to gain understanding on where your stream will be able to be viewed. Some services will keep your options to a single or a select few locations. Others will come with robust simulcasting functionality, allowing you to distribute a single stream live to various social, apps, and websites of your choosing. One additional caveat to consider is that some services will stream your content live to multiple destinations, yet not allow the event to be viewed after it has gone live.
Finally, the best providers provide technical flexibility and customization for how your stream can be distributed. On the one hand, they’ll ensure that multiple browsers and media players can all easily access your content. From a different angle, they’ll also give you the ability to insert things like video markers, generate highlights of key moments, or even trim out portions of your broadcasts to share in a more short form presentation, not requiring people to watch the original full length broadcast.
All of these aspects of presentation are important to carefully consider as you evaluate which live streaming service is the right fit for you and your online audience.
Imagine a single screen movie theater that can hold about 100 people. Now compare that to a 20 screen multiplex with a variety of ways to watch: in 3D, IMAX, on a big screen that fits 1,000 people, or on a small screen with boutique seating and waiters who deliver food. Variety is the spice of life, and giving your live stream viewers more choices will give you a better chance of offering people content that matches their personal viewing preferences.f
You can stream by yourself, but if you’re being realistic, why would you try to reinvent the wheel of every technical aspect of streaming outlined in the sections above? Wouldn’t a better use of your time be spent using a streaming service for the tech required to broadcast live? Even moreso, wouldn’t it be nice to have someone available to help you stream successfully from day one through the entire run of your live events over the years? Focusing on this second point, here are a few must-haves that a solid streaming service will help provide.
Nights and weekends are when most live streams tend to happen because they’re when people are free from work and school to attend, whether online or in person. So finding a service that is available when you need them, but also during the week to help onboard and train is ultra important.
Sometimes you’ll have a live streaming question that’s not urgent, and email might be the best way to get help. Other times, you’d like someone to chat back and forth with you to help get to the bottom of what you’re after. And in case of emergencies or deep dives, you’ll want phone or video calls available to meet your needs. If a provider only has a selection of these options, that’s not a great sign.
One of the most important aspects of achieving long term streaming success is to ensure that everything is set up correctly from day 1. That’s why streaming providers with a set of standard onboarding training calls to ensure that you’re set up to stream reliably from the start is a must have.
Beyond initial onboarding, services that offer periodic training to help uplevel and grow your usage and familiarity with the advanced features of a platform are also important. Sure, you can increase the value that you get out of your streaming service through your own practice and research, but having someone efficiently guide you through that journey will increase your chance of doing so, and let’s be honest, save you a lot of time.
Now we’ve gotten to perhaps the most important aspect of customer support in streaming, and that’s a real person providing expert support the moment that you need it, without having to wait 30 minutes. Because, let’s be honest, if you have an unresolved problem with your stream for that long, your event will likely be over, or all of your viewers will have probably left by then. So ask your prospective provider how long their average response time is, and how common streaming issues are typically resolved. Streaming involves a lot of moving parts, and often you’ll need an expert to help in a pinch when a problem arises, so make sure to keep this in mind during your evaluation.
Live streaming support can provide the same type of holistic help that a guidance counselor can provide along someone’s educational journey. When you’re early on in school, they’re available to help you navigate the basics. As you mature and begin to tackle more advanced material, or if a significant challenge comes up as you’re approaching graduation and determining where you fit in the workforce, they can be super effective at helping you navigate things. Chances are you won’t need your guidance counselor or your streaming support team every day, but when you do, they’re clutch to have around.
I’m sure you’re excited to hear that there’s a lot more to consider when looking for the right live stream service, right? To this point, we’ve covered all of the core pillars of streaming, but it’s important to note that live broadcasting isn’t only about getting the fundamentals right. That would be about as bare bones as serving chicken and broccoli for dinner without any salt, butter, or seasoning. And mostly importantly, leaving out the potatoes would be an absolute culinary shame!
So, just like food needs a bit of zest, so does streaming, and though there are hundreds of different features that might be offered to you through a specific streaming service, here are a few of the most important to look out for depending on the context of your unique situation and focus.
Built in monetization options like ticketing, donations, subscriptions, or pay-per-view are must haves for businesses looking to make money off of their live streams. Additionally, you’ll want the player experience to be white labeled and have the functionality to embed your own branding and watermark over the stream to make the everything look tailored and professional.
First of all, you’ll need unlimited streaming so that you can broadcast every sporting, musical, and academic event that you want. The last thing you need is to schedule an event that never actually starts because you’ve maxed out your monthly usage. Additionally, since you’ll likely have many different types of events, one of the best ways to bucket them in a way that your audience can easily navigate is through a custom OTT app experience for both your live and archived events.
Scoreboard overlays with customizable colors and tailored for different types of sports and their unique scoring (tennis, anyone?) is obviously a must have. Additionally, intuitive graphic overlay functionality will help easily integrate sponsorship and special announcement content into your online experience.
For most government institutions, compliance requires live multi-lingual captioning of all content to ensure that your stream is accessible for every potential viewer. Additionally, if you provide physical copies of content to your in person attendees, you’ll need a document display feature so that you can additionally provide that material to your online participants.
Password protection and privacy controls will help your stream from getting illegally distributed for free elsewhere online. Additionally, remote audio mixing controls for your online mix will allow your team to watch and listen to the stream in a quiet part of your venue, and create a custom mix for your listeners, because chances are your house mix won’t sound great on laptops and smartphones.
Simulcasting is a must for houses of worship broadcasters, as different demographics within your community will choose to watch your stream in different locations based on their personal preferences. Additionally, 4K streaming will help provide a beautiful picture to those watching on larger screens, especially if you are displaying your stream in an overflow room or at an external campus.
Regardless of your streaming context, find a live stream service that can help provide you with a custom streaming protocol. Custom protocols are designed to optimize your stream in the midst of specific challenges it might face. Using an older and out of touch protocol will keep your stream in the past, and won’t work well for modern video qualities and features.
Locking in the right features for your stream based on your individual context is like elevating your beverage game from tasteless and flat sparkling water to a flavorful and ginger ale. I know, some people like sparkling water, but if you’re going for taste, you can do so much better with a few thoughtfully added ingredients. Thanks, Vernors!
If you haven’t guessed by now, every must-have outlined above that makes up an ideal live stream service can be found in our live video streaming platform. From hosting, encoding, compression, distribution, custom protocol, presentation, support, and a wide range of advanced features, we’ve carefully curated our service to be able to meet the needs of any sized organization or individual looking to broadcast online. And don’t take my word for it, try it out in your world free through the link below.
And regardless of which platform you choose, best of luck in your search for the perfect live streaming service, and whenever you wind up going live, happy streaming!