Advanced Streaming Concepts and Production Tools

If you're new to the world of virtual events, know that you're definitely not alone. You've had to jump from being an event planner to a tech wizard pretty much overnight. While a Zoom meeting may have been enough a few months ago to pull off a virtual event, attendee, sponsor, and exhibitor expectations are a lot higher now. After all, that's why you're now a part of the PheedLoop family! Expectations for more seamless and highly produced events are out there, and it's up to us to meet them as event professionals and technologists.

In this article, we'd like to focus on production tools to help you create amazing live streams. Although live streams of your content are just one sliver of a much larger and more captivating event experience, high-quality content can really give a great impression. Luckily, it's not very hard to achieve. We mainly see events pursue a higher level of production for a portion of their sessions, say keynotes.

Advanced features you may be looking for include overlays, custom backgrounds, lower thirds, callouts, animations, watermarks, switching sources, etc. PheedLoop's built-in Meet & Stream is not necessarily designed for these advanced features, it's designed for the more common use-case which 95% of the sessions powered by PheedLoop (and in general) pursue which is a simple and effortless streaming solution of a presentation or panel without too many fancy bells and whistles.

So, what options exist for those who are looking to do something a bit more advanced?

Option 1 - Hire AV Production

We'll take a quick moment to mention the obvious option. If you're new to this whole world of high-quality event production and don't consider yourself too tech-savvy, or just want to offload the effort and stress of event production to the pros so that you can focus on event management, we'd suggest working with professionals. They know all the tricks of the trade and can work with you to produce fantastic virtual and hybrid event experiences.

In case you're in the market for AV and/or event production, here's a list of companies that have achieved a significant level of experience with PheedLoop, making them an excellent fit. Although we work with 200+ resellers and partners who cover various niches, here are a few with significant PheedLoop experience.

Option 2 - DIY Tech Solutions

While Meet & Stream and other streaming options are more than sufficient for the vast majority of events, if you are feeling adventurous, consider yourself tech-savvy, and want to produce your own high production value streams, then below is a list of awesome technologies worth considering.

It's important to keep in mind that an essential component of any of the options below is an RTMP streaming service that you will stream out to. PheedLoop offers RTMP streaming as part of Meet & Stream which you can use, or you can use any of the options we list and describe here. The basic idea is you can use one of the tools we describe below to compose your content in all kinds of creative ways, stream out to any RTMP service, and embed the player in your session in PheedLoop.

Vimeo Studio

The awesome thing about Vimeo Studio is it's extremely powerful, and integrated right into Vimeo Live (arguably the most popular third-party RTMP streaming service). It has everything you may need and so much more, and is ideal for intermediate to advanced stream producers. It's free if you're using Livestream or Vimeo already!

Restream Studio

Restream is an extremely popular service that is beginner-friendly and is built right into Restream's amazing simulcast functionality. It's perfect to host and stream meetings, add simple overlays and calls to action, add watermarks, captions, and more.

StreamYard

StreamYard is a relatively new entrant into the live stream technology space, but they've got a very affordable, user-friendly, and highly customizable tool. They've got a sweet demonstration with Gary Vaynerchuk right on their home page. If you're looking for something in the same category as Restream, definitely check out StreamYard.

OBS: Open Broadcaster Software

OBS is possibly the most widely used, completely free, live stream production tool. It's not as beautiful and modern looking as some of the other tools we've mentioned, but it's incredibly powerful and simple once you get the hang of it. Did we mention that it's free?

Others

There are countless solutions out there. Others worth considering are Wirecast, Streamlabs, Castr, XSplit, and Twitch Studio.