Running a school takes an enormous amount of effort, and even saying that is an understatement. Regardless of whether the school is public or private, teachers are regularly asked to double or triple dip into responsibilities outside their classroom or core responsibilities. Administrative staff often get spread thin, too. If your school is lucky enough to have a technical director, that person can feel overwhelmed fast, as well. They oversee the technology in the building, the devices in every student's hands, and the event tech needed for both in-person and online experiences.
Many organizations, like cities and churches, live stream one event a week, usually at the same time and almost always in the same room. If only it were that easy for schools!
Schools want to stream choir concerts, band performances, graduations, and parent meetings. All of this can get tricky, but athletics typically takes the complexity to a whole other level. Home games might be in the fieldhouse, the gym, or on any number of fields and courts spread across campus. Yet this only covers half of every sports season. Away games mean packing up gear, traveling to a rival school, and connecting to an unfamiliar (and often unreliable) network in the short window between arrival and tip-off, first pitch, kickoff, or… you get the point.
So how does one tech director manage all of this, especially when they're sharing the streaming responsibilities with teachers, parent volunteers, and students who pitch in when they can?
There's no magic easy button. But there are ways to make school live streaming a lot more manageable, and we've built our platform around many of them.
So here are six tips that help schools get consistent, high-quality broadcasts, even with a small staff. Let's get into it.
Remote Audio Mixing: A Five-Minute Fix
Encoder Diagnostics: Catch Problems Early
Away Game Streaming: Protect Your Quality
User Permissions: Safeguard Your Content
Automated Scheduling: Stop Watching the Clock
Accessibility and Data Privacy: Questions to Ask
Final Thoughts
Here's a scenario you probably know too well. You drive to the spring band concert, arrive early, sit behind the mixer, and stay there for two hours. During that time, you make maybe three small adjustments to the stream audio. That's a lot of time and gas for a few fader moves.
With remote audio mixing, you can log in from wherever you are, adjust the stream mix when needed, and let it run the rest of the time. All it takes is BoxCast RemoteMix and a compatible digital mixer, and you can control your board in real time from a laptop or tablet, whether you're in your office, at another event, or on your couch at home.
This works well for concerts, graduation, assemblies, and even games. It also helps prevent burnout, so that when you do want to travel to manage the most important streams of the year in person, you’ll feel a lot more fresh to mix in person for a multi-hour event. Overall, remote control means less driving, less sitting, and fewer hours asked of you and your volunteers every week which really adds up throughout the school year.
Regardless of which brand or product that you use, encoders sometimes have problems. This reality isn’t a surprise to anyone with even the smallest amount of experience in the world of technology. The worst time for a problem with your encoder to occur, however, is five minutes into your event, especially if it just so happens to be one that generates higher viewership than normal.
A better scenario is to catch encoder issues long before game day or opening curtain. So as you evaluate different streaming setups, ensure that your encoder runs diagnostics regularly, keeps firmware updated automatically, and sends you detailed notifications when something actually needs attention.
Finding out about a problem a few days or weeks before an important live online event gives you ample time to actually fix it in a calm environment and ensure that it won’t happen again. Waiting for the problem to surface mid-event will put you in the exact opposite scenario.
When problems occur with a live stream, human-made adjustments can be really great, but they can also be accomplished slowly, or only provide partial fixes based on the level of expertise of the person making the adjustments.
Issues are less likely to occur for events happening on your campus, where you control the network and can spend a lot of time testing and tweaking signal strength from every location that a stream will be sent from. Events at other schools, though, come with much more risk and unfortunately carry a higher chance of something going wrong with the network that your stream is running on.
In these scenarios, moving away from human-controlled troubleshooting is a wise choice, specifically through a streaming feature called “link quality adjustment.”
Here’s what can happen without it. Say you're streaming a 90-minute game. About 30 minutes into the event, right when things are getting good, the network suddenly slows to a crawl. Your encoder keeps pushing the same high-bitrate stream it started with, the now lower network speed can't keep up. Viewers then get stuck staring at a buffering wheel until the stream drops entirely. This is every broadcaster's nightmare.
With link quality adjustment, your streaming protocol senses the slowdown and automatically lowers your outgoing video bitrate to realistically ride through the rough patch. The picture might get a little softer for a bit, but your stream stays alive for all 90 minutes of the event. And when the network recovers back to full speed, the bitrate (and your video quality) climbs right back up.
What’s great about this functionality is that no human intervention is required. It doesn’t require a human to notice the problem, then figure out in the moment the correct quality to lower to, and then pay attention to when the network speed increases so that the quality can resume optimal performance. Instead, it just works, and sometimes the quality only has to be lowered a bit, meaning that most viewers won’t even really notice.
Unfortunately, you won’t find this feature on most streaming services, but link quality adjustment is built into BoxCast Flow, our patented streaming protocol that powers BoxCast encoders and the BoxCast Broadcaster app. Through this feature and others like it, we have helped thousands of schools successfully stream their home and away events reliably, even when network issues arise. And best of all, without human intervention needed.
This one sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s often overlooked and can prevent one of the most common problems out there in school streaming: someone changing something without realizing what they've done.
As you begin to broadcast more and more events at your school online, you’ll find that a wide range of people will want to help or gain access in some capacity. Coaches, scoreboard volunteers, the student media club, the band director, and even parents volunteering to help setup cameras and provide play by play event commentary. All of this is a good thing, however, not everyone needs the keys to everything, and giving everyone equal access opens up the door and increases the likelihood for unintended changes to be made that could cause big problems.
Setting up the right user roles as well as the appropriate user permissions lets those helping do their part without accidentally deleting your archives, canceling a broadcast, or creating three duplicate events for Friday's game.
So always be careful to give people access to what they actually need, and keep full control in the hands of the few who should have it. And on an adjacent note, if you're working with a large number of students, we’ve put together a guide on giving student volunteers the right streaming roles and responsibilities without overwhelming them. We hope it helps!
Remember when you had to put a metal key into your car door and twist it clockwise to unlock it? Now most of us take for granted how our car unlocks when we walk up to it with the fob in our pocket, or even from far away through an app on our phone.
Live streaming has gone through a similar shift. It used to require someone to wait for the perfect moment to click "Start," then come back later to click "Stop." This may sound trivial, but live events are often busy and those in the production booth are often wearing multiple hats and juggling a dozen other things all at once. With this in mind, it's easy to forget to start the stream at the right time, or to let it run long after the final buzzer because you're busy with something else to actually click to end it.
With automated live streaming, you configure the event ahead of time and the platform handles the rest. Your broadcast starts and stops on its own, right on schedule, every time. Even if you’re using a third-party encoder, you can start sending your feed early, and the broadcast won't go live until the scheduled start time. You can even schedule recurring events, like every home game, up to 100 times in advance, and they’ll always be right on time, every time.
That's one less thing to do when the event is starting and everything is chaos, and one less thing to remember when it's all wrapping up.
It’s easy to think of live streaming at your school as a straightforward task to complete, and one that needs to be done at a certain level of quality to ensure that it represents your school well and is actually viewable by those who tune in.
However, ensuring that your school streams can be experienced by all and that your data can be handled in a secure way is also an important part of the equation. This may seem like somewhat of an outlier, compared to features like scoreboard overlays and replay highlights, but it’s actually just as important to keep in mind as you stream at your school.
Live captioning, and in some locales, multi-lingual captioning is a must for live broadcasting events to families and city residents. Many government institutions have certain ADA requirements beginning to be enforced to ensure that captions are provided to make live events a positive experience for all who want to participate.
Password protection can help you control who has access to certain events, and you can even extend access to certain individuals by creating by invitation only events. For more public events, you can apply stream obfuscation to your streams which will ensure that your streams can’t be downloaded and shared in external places that you don’t control. Overall, features like these will ensure that any sensitive information that you may stream can be guarded and protected from those who you don’t want to have access to, for the privacy and safety of your students.
It’s been said that purchasing a house can be one of the biggest blessings in life. Conversely, buying a house when you’re not ready for it, or one that’s not well made and comes with a lot of problems can wind up being one of the biggest challenges. The difference comes down to if you’re ready to take on the financial responsibility, and if you select a home that is in good shape and passes appropriate inspections or requirements.
A similar principal can be applied to live streaming in academic institutions. Go about streaming in a way that’s complicated or unreliable, and it can become one of the biggest headaches and challenges in your building. Conversely, finding a way to automate it and maintain quality through smart protocols and security features, and it can be one of the most exciting things you offer to students and their families.
We know you've got enough on your plate already. Your live stream shouldn’t be a heavy burden, but something that is relatively automated and helps you easily incorporate more families and viewers into all of the wonderful things you’re doing at your school.