This year we live-streamed 48 live actions and events. Here’s what we learned.
It’s been a really busy year for the team at Re:Action. We’ve had the opportunity to support more than 100 organizations in 39 rallies, marches and press conferences. We’ve produced 78 hours of live streaming of 48 actions and events, wheat pasted almost 10,000 posters, and done 20 projections. Keeping with our mission of bringing professional advocacy tools to local, POC led and grassroots projects, we have been able to donate our time and gear on half of all projects.
One of the most exciting aspects of doing this work at scale is having the opportunity to experiment, try new things and learn as we go. While things have slowed down for the holiday season we wanted to share some of what we’ve learned throughout the year.
Over the next few days we’ll be publishing a series of articles sharing some of our accomplishments, mistakes, and what we’ve learned over the year. In this first segment we’ll take a look at our live video work.
What We Learned Live Streaming This Year
Producing a livestream can be an incredibly powerful way of expanding the reach of any action or event. In a media market that is increasingly saturated, relying completely on earned media to get the word out can be dicey so putting in the work to create a high-quality live stream can ensure that you have a chance to connect with your audience, give reporters who couldn’t make it to the action an opportunity to cover after the event live or after the fact, and ensure that you have broadcast-quality footage to share with media or use in post production. In the past year we’ve produced streams that have been watched by over 100,000 people live, and viewed millions more times on social media after the fact.
Check out some of the Live Streams we produced this year:
Challenges We Navigated
But there are also tons of ways that live streaming actions and events can fail. Live video requires a lot of internet bandwidth and a really stable connection. When we’re on the streets, or at the Capitol or White House we don’t have the benefit of hard wired internet or stable WiFi. We are at the mercy of the cell phone tower Gods. That’s usually fine for short live clips, but when you’re streaming an hour-long event we’ve found that the stream drops about half the time, which just isn’t acceptable when we are working with partners who are investing time and energy in pushing their followers to tune in live.
After a lot of experimentation with cheaper options and DIY solutions, at the beginning of this year we took the leap to invest in a LiveU solo encoder and unlimited data plans on all of the major carriers. LiveU solo is a great tool because it bonds together signals from our AT&T, Verizon and TMobile hotspots. When one connection slows down or stops working the technology routes the signal through the other connections. And then it puts together all of the pieces of data in the cloud. It’s the same technology that broadcast news videographers use for most of their live shots.
Since we invested in our LiveU gear we haven’t had a single stream drop completely and we can regularly stream in Full HD.
On Screen Graphics in the Streets
Equipped with a solid video feed, our next challenge has been finding a way to include on-screen graphics like a “starting soon” screen, titles for speakers and hold/“be right back” screens. This is relatively simple to do if you have a producer off-site with stable internet who can do the switching, but that means doubling the size of the team for any given stream. That’s great when we have the time and budget to recruit another operator, but not always possible when we are working on quick turnarounds or with groups with limited budgets.
Because we’re committed to getting professional tools in the hands of grassroots projects with limited resources, we spent a lot of time looking for a solution where a single camera operator go live and control on screen graphics in the field. After a lot of experimentation we landed on a workflow where we push feed to LightStream Studio where the graphics are added, either as static .png overlays or, for more ambitious projects we add in animated motion graphics through Uno.
LightStream studio also has a great feature that allows us to keep the stream live, even if the camera feed fails for some reason. This has helped several times when we’ve knocked ourselves offline while moving cameras (although once we forgot to turn off the stream and accidentally left a feed running for more than 24 hrs!).
Live “Starting Soon” screens for a smooth start to the stream
Because we are streaming movement events, not rehearsed programming, the start of any event can be a little difficult to anticipate. Actions often start late. And when they do start, they often get started without warning, when an emcee walks up to the microphone and starts talking.
Delayed starts lead people watching at home to start wondering “what’s going on?” Or “is this still happening?!” Then when we start, because of delays with connecting and actually getting live it can take as much as 30 seconds to be live before the feed is actually streaming out to the world. And that’s if everything goes well. If there’s some problem connecting we find ourselves troubleshooting through the first part of the event.
To deal with this we’ve started using live “Starting Soon” screens, where we show a live shot of the podium or stage, in a window next to graphics for the event. That lets people tuning in online see what’s going on and, because we are up and running with a stable connection we can change out the graphics package and be in action instantaneously.
Going live on everybody’s social platforms with ReStream
Many of the events that we support are coalition projects with a number of different organizations working together to make them happen. Often, a number of groups will want to host the stream on their pages. And they don’t want to just share a link to another group’s page. For some time we have been using ReStream to push a feed out to a number of different social media platforms.
Initially that required us to either get logins to each account or walk the social media managers for every organization through the process of finding stream keys and RTMP links for their pages. That worked okay, but it would inevitably lead to scrambling to add new destinations to a stream 10 minutes before we go live because somebody forgot to get us their information.
But recently, ReStream rolled out a new feature called Pairs, which allows us to create and share a link where any of the sponsoring organizations can login and pair their own social channels with the event. Then, when we go live, the stream pushes to everyone’s social pages all at the same time. This has dramatically simplified the process of adding groups to these coalition streams and gives each organization more control over how the streams are displayed on their pages.
A little work goes a long way with post production
In the time we’ve been doing live video for events we’ve collected hundreds of hours of really powerful video footage that often just sits on a hard drive somewhere. For quite some time we’ve been uploading raw footage into a Google folder and sharing it with partners for any post-production work they want to do with the footage. But many of our partner organizations don’t really have the capacity to take a 10GB .mp4 file and work with it.
While doing full sizzle reel edits is beyond what we’re usually asked to do, we have started extracting clips of each speaker, doing some basic color correction and audio touch up, adding some good looking captions and sharing those clips with partners. It’s a quick process that doesn’t take a lot of work but has been incredibly effective in pushing out some of the most compelling content from each event. And it’s given grassroots projects with limited resources the ability to turn around high quality short videos almost immediately.
Looking Ahead — Instagram, Multi-Camera and Mobile Streams
Looking into 2024, one of our major priorities will be exploring the possibility of pushing streams to Instagram. Up until recently, Instagram had limited cross-posting and third party streams to a small number of accounts that had access to their “Producer” function. We’ve worked with groups with a major Instagram presence but still have not come across a single organization that has access to that function. Then in December of 2023, Instagram opened RTMP feeds to any user with a pro account. This could be a huge breakthrough but it seems like there are some significant limitations that we need to work through before we can go live on Instagram as part of our work flow.
We are also experimenting with running multiple camera feeds and mobile feeds. Right now most of our streams come from a single camera fixed in a tripod. There have been a few actions where we’ve picked up the camera and followed a march or petition delivery, but going from the stationary camera plugged into out LiveU encoder, wireless modems, and often a power source to something we can walk with is something that is going to take some time to work out.
One exciting possibility is using a GoPro or other action camera for projects like this. We’ve already had some success using a GoPro as a second camera and we’re really impressed with the stabilization features on the newer versions of the GoPro. But before this is a regular part of our work flow it is going to require some more testing and experimentation.
Partners with us on live video for your action or event
Interested in producing a livestream of an action or event you have coming up? Reach out to the team at Re:Action to talk with us about how we can create a powerful livestream!
