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Live content is trending right now. What I find particularly interesting about the companies using it right are the organizations creating free online television shows and taking full advantage of YouTube and Facebook Live. Streaming video on the internet has been around since the 90’s but it finally seems like the technology is ready for prime time. In this VLOG, we are going to demonstrate how to set up a 24/7 live streaming channel and review how a few of customers are leading the way with this exciting new technology.
The writing is on the wall for cable television (Check out our review here). Every major cable television network lost paid subscribers in 2016. Online services such as: Amazon Fire, Hulu and Netflix are replacing cable’s premium content and now live streaming services from YouTube and Facebook are setting the stage for replacing live content. Let’s take a closer look at YouTube’s “Live Channel” which has been growing at a rate of roughly 200,000/subscribers per month.
The channel is organized into the following playlists:
Featured Live Streams (Bloomberg and Bloomberg Politics)
Live Now (A collection of the most popular live streaming on YouTube)
Live Now – Sports (A collection of the most popular live streaming Sports on YouTube)
Live Now – News (Live News Collection)
Live Now – Gaming (Live Gaming Collection)
Live Now – Music (Live Music Collection)
Recent Live Streams (Most viewed recently live streamed videos available on-demand)
Upcoming Live Streams (Live rallies, sports and talk shows with ability to set reminders)
Google Hangouts on Air (Collection of live talk shows using Google Hangouts)
Live Now – Animals
Live Now – Technology
Each of these live playlists feature roughly 100 of the top live channels in their respective genres. Many of these shows are also available on Facebook Live such as Cheddar a popular news show broadcasting from the New York Stock Exchange. I did some quick spot checking on their channel and found while only 6 people were watching on Youtube over 450 people were watching on Facebook. More and more reports are showing that facebook is REALLY optimizing live content. So what has Cheddar done? They are live broadcasting on both platforms… the obvious choice.
So, I’d like to highlight one of our customers broadcasting 24/7 called The Tech Buzz. The Tech Buzz, is a technology focused live show that broadcasts with up 6 CDN’s including YouTube and Facebook simultaneously. The Tech Buzz is using a service called Joicaster.co to broadcast their show to: YouTube, Facebook, Bitgravit and StreamUp. Heywood explains 112 of his show that he has used multi-casting get hundreds of thousands of additional views on his weekly show.
At first glance it looks like The Tech Buzz is always streaming live but what I realized after talking to him is that Heywood has set up a 24/7 streaming box playing his latest episodes on a loop. So his content is benefiting from the live optimization and reaching a large audience all the time. In the world of internet streaming a “Streaming Box” can be as simple as a Mac Mini running the latest version of Open Broadcast Software.
Here is a picture of a i5 Intel NUC we set up in our office to stream 24/7. Once we installed Open Broadcast Software and downloaded all of our content we connected our NUC to the internet. Before we put our NUC in the server room we set it up with LogMeIn so it could be remotely managed. It’s fairly easy to set-up OBS to stream video on a loop so once we started streaming to YouTube our 24/7 live show was up and running.
One of the tips I would give for anyone trying to set up a live streaming channel on YouTube is thinking about live integrations. Can you add a live integration to Twitter or Facebook? Can you add a live chat feature. The best live streams feature information that is timely and up to date. Let’s take a look at our 24/7 live channel we set up just today!
I hope this blog post has been eye opening for anyone interested in the live streaming and internet TV world. It’s surprising to me how easy it is, to essentially start your own live channel on YouTube or Facebook and run it 24/7. Let’s be honest, this is a 24/7 world we live in and technology has us connected around the world, around the clock. Tune in to our live show every Friday at 11AM PST / 2PM EST or watch our live shows rebroadcast here 24/7: .