CASE STUDY – live streaming consultancy for ‘Banned Sauce’
Exciting times – I’ve just completed my first bit of free consultancy!
A member of the musical group Banned Sauce approached me to try and help them with a live streaming solution. They’ve recently recorded some new music and filmed a music video to go alongside it. Before COVID-19 they had planned to have a launch party in a cinema, screening the video, playing the music and having a bit of a Q&A session. The challenge was to recreate this online.
IMPORTANT – a huge thanks to my friend Toby Lawrence for his advice here. He regularly live-streams DJ sets and his advice was invaluable 🙂
There were several elements to this task;
- how to live stream a Q&A session
- how to live stream a pre-recorded video
- where to host the event
- how to get people to attend
How to live stream a Q&A session & a prerecorded video
This was definitely the most complicated part of the operation. We all know that you can have multi-person face-calls using a variety of platforms like Skype, FaceTime, Zoom or Microsoft Teams, but how do you then take that feed with all the lovely faces and stream it to a different location, preferably somewhere where viewers can drop comments in realtime for the Q&A?
OBS to the rescue! OBS is a video and live streaming tool that can take a variety of sources as inputs and throw them out the other end as a single live stream.
There’s a couple options here, so you can try your preferred method;
1 – Skype has an NDI option that can throw out your group call as a video feed. You can plug this NDI into OBS.
2 – You can schedule a Zoom meeting, then start it. OBS gives you an option to live stream any program you have running on your computer, and this works particularly well with a scheduled Zoom Call.
3 – from a quick search, you should be able to do similar with any group chat platforms, FaceTime was the only one I struggled with. If you want to use something other than Zoom or Skype then get in contact and we can figure it out together.
After getting the live chat in, the music video was easy. You can import any kind of media into OBS and then trigger it when your ready.
The final touch was to add the Banned Sauce logo and a bit of copy to the OBS output. This meant that, regardless of whether you were watching the music video of the Q&A, you’d see their logo, hastag and website.
Where to host the event and how to get people to attend
Facebook seemed like the obvious choice for this, with YouTube as a close second. I leant towards Facebook on this occasion because I felt Banned Sauce would benefit from FaceBooks ‘event’ and ‘watch party’ functions. More info below.
OBS can send its feed to any source, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitch and more – you can even send to multiple sources at the same time if you fancy it.
Note – when sending your stream to Facebook – make sure to use the Live Producer page (once logged in).
My advice for Banned Sauce;
1 – Using the band’s FaceBook page, set up an event. Be wary of timezones (the band has a heavy Polish following and you don’t want to confuse your audience with text posts about ‘7pm’ etc. Let the event page tell people the time – it will do the time zone translation for you.
2 – Get inviting! On FB, make use of mailing lists and followings on other platforms.
3 – Get some teasers out in advance. Clips of the video, some song lyrics – anything that can create a bit of mystery and excitement.
4 – About 15mins before the event is due to kick-off, start your stream – you’ll want to make sure everything is working. Remember, people will be notified and can start watching at that point, so make sure you run your tests with something other than what you want to reveal! (Play an old song/video to get people warmed up).
5 – your stream will come from your ‘page’, so share it onto your event page (in case people have signed up to the event, but not ‘liked’ your ‘page’ yet.
6 – make sure all the band members share the stream onto their personal profiles / their Twitters etc. When sharing to their own FB page, use the ‘watch party’ options directly below the live feed, as well as the standard ‘share’ button. It will look like one of the below (watch together / invite friends to watch). These are much more effective ways of getting people to join you.
OR
And that’s about it! Simple really – plug your face-chat into OBS, line up your video, then stream into a FaceBook event!
Let me know if you’d like me to consult on a similar event, I’d be very happy to help out 🙂
SOME USEFUL RESOURCES