How to Produce a Great Livestreamed Event on Any Budget: Part 1

Practical tips for going live on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook Live, or anywhere else

Packed in like sardines. Building a team that is both technically proficient and able to work will almost always make the difference in an event. Photos: Alex Lindsay

Twenty years ago, livestreams were delivered at a glacial pace of 15 frames per second, and barely anyone made or viewed them. Today, the tools could not be easier to use or less expensive. The market is flooded with professional but affordable video equipment that anyone can use to stream for free from a laptop or even their phone. Public content delivery networks (CDNs) like YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitter, and Twitch remove the cost barrier to streaming.

Still, the industry sputters. Sure, you can watch sports live online, but the style is still more like broadcast than a proper livestream. By proper, I will argue that it must take advantage of the medium in some way. When we started shooting films, we just recorded stage plays. Over the following decades, we moved further and further away from the stage performance as we took full advantage of what film offered us. Livestreaming offers additional data streams, interactivity with the audience, and freedom from traditional ad models — to start. Just taking what we broadcast and putting it on the internet is much like filming stage plays a century ago. It’s a start, but we will look back on these days as quaint. Sports teams are quietly experimenting with what will probably be the future of broadcasting. The constraint here is actually the broadcast contracts they signed that limit what they can do with game content.

With the exception of those hosted on Twitch, most non-broadcast-style live events garner a small fraction of the audience that creators hope for, and worse, attention is fleeting. Average view time, the “true” sign of a strong event, is often measured in seconds.

While everyone senses that there’s a pot of gold somewhere, they keep digging in the wrong places.

This is not an outsider’s observation. I have been on the front lines of this revolution for a decade. Starting with a laptop and a webcam and growing to 54-foot double-expando broadcast trucks, I have overseen over 2,000 livestreams in almost as many locations. I took part in many of the…