22 CONTENT FOCUS Live Streaming
HOW DOES A CDN WORK? CDNs are made up of a large number of server farms around the world joined together by ultra-fast connections. When a file is uploaded to a local server for viewing on-demand it is rapidly duplicated across all the CDN’s servers. You can upload a file in London, and when it is replicated, a user in New York will be accessing it from a local server in New York. This means that there are multiple copies of your content on servers around the world, and that ensures 100% availability. For example, if servers in London were down, the users in London might be served their file from Frankfurt. There might be a negligible drop in performance, but the file would still be available. One advantage of working through a CDN is redundancy. “You have the output you want to broadcast going into two dierent encoders then publishing hopefully through two dierent internet connections to two dierent places on the CDN,” says Ward. “That means that if something on the CDN goes down and you’re publishing through London, and London has an outage, your signal is still being sent via Bristol, via a dierent internet connection. “On CDNs, that seamlessly falls over, and the audience never knows that they’re suddenly accessing a secondary stream – the stream just continues as it was. Facebook and other social platforms only have a primary stream in, so we’ve done a lot of work to create a secondary
units, such as the company’s LU200, permit camera ops to wear them and move easily. More robust models like the LU500 can bond up to eight network connections, while being combined with the LiveU extender and providing up to 20Mbps. Streaming media producers will also partner with a CDN, or several of them for redundancy, to deliver the live stream anywhere in the world. “Quite often, we’re working with a production company,” explains Groovy Gecko’s Ward. “They give us a TX, their live output from their camera mix, and then it’s split (for safety reasons) into two or more encoders, which encode that stream into a suitable video format. “Maybe we’ll add in other interactive elements like live polling on Facebook Live. Then those live streams, once they’re complete, are sent to what’s called a publishing point – that’s on a standard CDN, something like Akamai – and then going onto the client’s own page or, more commonly these days, a publishing point on something like Periscope, Facebook Live or YouTube. “Of course, you can run a very simple low stream o a single server that a company may be hosting, but as soon as that hits a certain number of viewers everything’s going to start to fall apart. From a CDN point of view, we use people like Akamai, which delivers a considerable portion of streaming on the Internet. If that goes down and fails to work we’ve all got much bigger problems.”
ON POINT Longer-form content that is important to your target audience and enables interaction is likely to perform well in a live stream
LIVE SOCIAL
The functionality of live social platforms has enabled brands to move away from live videos delivered by smartphone to professionally produced multi-camera interactive streams. At the outset it’s important to consider what types of content will work best as live social streams. The key thing to remember is: just because something is happening live doesn’t mean it has to be a live stream. There are only three reasons why content should be live-streamed: 1 The event or content delivered via the live stream is of such importance to your target audience that they’ll want to see it as it happens – for example, a major new product launch or a unique live event. 2 The content of the live stream allows the audience to interact live, such as asking a well-known expert a question. 3 Content is delivered over social but connected to traditional broadcast channels, for example an advert on TV which directs users to view a live stream for more interactivity. “The data we’ve gathered from producing hundreds of live video streams for Facebook Live has shown
that if content does not come under one of these three categories it is unlikely to deliver a large viewership,” says Jake Ward. “Therefore, it should simply be delivered as on-demand content, as this reduces risk and allows the content to be more precisely crafted.” Regardless of the content, Groovy Gecko suggests that, contrary to the accepted wisdom that social content should be short, with live social streaming, longer content is actually much more eective.
“The core audience who have liked and engaged with your brand page are more willing to watch content for longer if it’s interactive, or it can deliver a unique live experience,” says Ward. “Additionally, the nature of sharing and liking of live video posts means that longer streams work more eectively. Live streams also feature more prominently in user’s timelines when they are live.” Groovy Gecko data suggests that streams lasting over 20 minutes reach a much larger proportion of audiences.
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