55 THE LIVE LIFE IRL Streaming
HOT SHOES Stills from Pete Wilkins’ marathon live stream reveal the tech involved, from a shoulder- mounted cam to mobile phone
and things like how to set your bit rate and frame rate. So I started creating some tutorials on YouTube and it snowballed in popularity until I was able to do it as my full-time job.” In the few years since then, the number of live streamers has boomed, and the major tech players have become fully aware of the increasing size of the market and the potential profits. Amazon’s purchase of Twitch five years ago for almost $1 billion (after a deal with Google fell through) may have baffled outsiders at the time, but Twitch is now one of the world’s major content platforms. YouTube has also improved its live streaming tools, and Microsoft has been aggressively boosting its live streaming offering Mixer, and has been working hard to lure big names onto the platform. “The major tech giants are all heavily investing in live streaming. They’re realising how powerful a platform it can be for content creators and they want a piece of that pie,” explains Wilkins. “From the content side, people are wanting to stream a lot more than video games,” he continues. “It’s all kinds of things – travelling around another country or cooking live streams, or music or sports. There’s a demand for anything that was on YouTube to be in a live stream format and to have that live interaction with a creator. It’s so much more powerful than a VOD.” That live interaction, though Wilkins notes it doesn’t sound like much on the face of it, can make all the difference.
PEOPLE WANT TO BE PART OF THE EVENT AND IT’S AN EASYWAY TO INVOLVE YOUR COMMUNITY
“It’s so much better to be able to interact with a creator and to interact with them live. I compare it to sports – it’s not as interesting to watch your favourite football team play when you’re watching highlights or video on demand as it is when you’re watching in the stadium, or seeing it at the same time as everyone else.” needs solid wireless technology to back it up. This has often been a phone with a Wi-Fi connection or full bars on a 4G signal, but increasingly even individual streamers are being held to the highest technology standards. With so many tools now available, an unexpected interruption or glitch doesn’t mean you’re a plucky, indy streamer working at the cutting edge – it just means you’re lazy and haven’t prepared your technology properly. “You can just go and live stream with your smartphone. It will drain your battery quickly. And there are certainly a lot of people doing that. The quality of cameras is so good it’s a very watchable experience,” says Wilkins. “The difficulty is that if you’re GOING THE DISTANCE The ‘Real Life’ part of IRL streaming
moving around, you only have one network provider at a time on your phone, so if you move out of range, your signal can drop.” There are companies building different equipment specifically for live streamers. LiveU’s Solo is a pocket-sized bit encoder that receives video via HDMI or SDI, and seamlessly bonds multiple cellular or Wi-Fi networks to enable an unbroken signal. It costs about $1000 (or you can hire one for around $200 a day), plays well with most CDN, and makes it simple to live stream to your platform of choice. Wilkins has tested the reliability of the LiveU Solo as few have. Last year, he was
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