Product launches
- Live
- The host, the chat and the Q&A.
- Prepared in advance
- The product demo, recorded and scheduled to play out on the announced minute.
- Afterwards
- The recording becomes the replay, and the reveal is cut into vertical clips.
Use cases
Four shapes of broadcast, produced four different ways
Not everything should be live, and not everything should be recorded. Each of these explains which parts are which.
Product launches
Pre-record the demo, be live in the chat — the one risk you cannot rehearse away, removed.
Webinars
Guests join from a browser link, slides are a scene, and the same session can run again later.
Concerts & events
One feed out of a venue with difficult internet, fanned out to every platform from our side.
Podcasts
Remote guests with nothing to install, recorded while it streams, cut into clips afterwards.
What is live, and what is not
For most broadcasts the honest answer is "some of it". This is how each of the four is usually split, and what happens once it is over.
Webinars
- Live
- The presenter, the slides and the questions.
- Prepared in advance
- Guest links sent the day before. The whole session can also be scheduled to run again at a new time.
- Afterwards
- A recording in Storage to send to everyone who missed it.
Concerts & events
- Live
- The performance itself, from the venue's mixer.
- Prepared in advance
- A holding slate or an intro video, and a backup stream in case the main link fails.
- Afterwards
- The full show for a later release, and highlights for promotion.
Podcasts
- Live
- The conversation, with guests joining from their browsers.
- Prepared in advance
- The intro and outro, and a name card for each guest.
- Afterwards
- The episode waiting in Storage, and clips that do most of the discovery.
Ten minutes before any of them
Whatever you are producing, the same five things go wrong at the start. Each has a free tool that runs in your browser and needs no account.
Check the camera
See the resolution and frame rate your camera actually delivers, which is often lower than the box says.
Check the microphone
Watch the level, catch clipping, and record five seconds to hear yourself the way the audience will.
Pick a bitrate your connection can hold
Enter your upload speed and platforms and get encoder settings back. With multistreaming you upload one stream, however many places it goes.
Have every stream key ready
Where each platform keeps its stream key and server URL, for the destinations you add by hand.
Put a countdown on screen
A countdown overlay you add to OBS as a browser source, so early arrivals know they are in the right place.
Questions about producing them
- Can one broadcast mix live and pre-recorded parts?
- Yes. Upload the recorded part ahead of time and schedule it to play out to the same stream, or start it by hand from the broadcast page. It goes out in real time, like any other source.
- What upload speed do we need?
- Enough for one stream at the quality you choose, with about a third of your upload left spare. Adding destinations adds nothing to your upload, because the copies are made on our side. The bitrate calculator does the arithmetic for your platforms.
- What happens if a connection drops mid-broadcast?
- Each destination is its own outbound session, so a problem on one platform does not touch the others. If your own feed drops, plans with stream continuity keep the destinations alive with a holding slate until you reconnect — and SRT ingest avoids many of those drops in the first place.
- Do guests need to install anything?
- No. Guests join the Studio from a link in their browser, pick a camera and microphone, and appear in the broadcast. They do not need an account either.