6 More Expert Tips for Successful Streaming With Facebook Live
By Jim Bask
Facebook Live was the hot platform in 2017, and it’s only going to grow in 2018. Here’s helpful advice on how organizations can create perfect live video events.
As we start the new year, I predict that we’ll see a continued increase of live streaming on Facebook Live. For many groups, nonprofit organizations, and government departments, Facebook Live provides all of the tools necessary to organize a live-streaming event—an event calendar, publishing tools and APIs to get streams up and running, live interaction with audiences, and automatic archiving of the live stream for later viewing.
As I assist new and existing clients in the Facebook Live space, I encounter special situations quite frequently. I offered some advice a few months back, and here are more tips and recommendations to share:
1. Audio requirement: Given that the default behavior of Facebook video is to automatically play with muted audio in your news feed, I thought that a live stream published without an audio track wouldn’t be an issue. However, Facebook Live will not publish a live stream if there is no audio track present. Recently, with a nonprofit wilderness conservation group, I was asked to assist with an underwater live feed. There was no microphone or audio to carry with the live video image. In order to publish the feed, we added a silent, low-bitrate audio track. We were using FFmpeg to publish the RTMP feed, and silence was added by using the switches -f lavfi -i anullsrc after the video input switches.
2. Credential lockdown: In larger organizations where one or more administrators on a Facebook page manage contributors’ and editors’ access, make sure credentials are checked for validity in the hours leading up to a live-stream event…[continue reading]