Take a look, below.

STREAM DIRECTLY TO FACEBOOK FROM THE CAMERA

In this episode of Back to Basics we demonstrate how to live stream directly to Facebook using a PTZOptics camera. You can now live stream to multiple destinations inside of Facebook including: your personal page, a page you manage a Facebook group or an event. So you have quite a few options for live streaming to Facebook and any of these destinations are reachable via a custom RTMP streaming key given from Facebook. The basics of live streaming to Facebook with a PTZOptics camera involves entering the Facebook RTMP streaming key into your PTZOptics IP camera interface.

PTZoptics.com

Check out the full article from PTZOptics HERE.

Learn more about PTZOptics HERE

This testing feature will allow you to broadcast to ONLY page admins so you can rest assured your stream is working properly!

Check out the video on Facebook HERE

The digital media department also uses Wirecast to stream exclusive Facebook Live video events, such as a 20th anniversary re-broadcast of the D.C. United’s 1996 MLS Cup championship game. Since that game was over two hours long, the digital media team used Wirecast to create a playlist of smaller segments, including first half, second half, half time and overtime, for easier streaming. The video was also interspersed with “Back in the Day” breaks that showcased the original commercials that ran during the original broadcast.

Perrie explains, “It was an exciting time back then, an amazing game, played in the rain, and visually awesome. I broke it up into video clips using the layer feature in Wirecast, and worked things back and forth between the layers to stream the whole thing. It was hugely successful as our fans got to relive their glory days. We were delighted by how many people it reached, and we plan to do similar broadcasts again in the future.” Click here for the full case study.

Click here for all Wirecast.

From Wowza

Built for Professional Productions.

1. Simulcast with ClearCaster

Facebook Live may be the world’s top live-streaming platform—but it isn’t the only platform. ClearCaster now enables simulcasting functionality through integration with our industry-leading Wowza Streaming Cloud service. Just use the advanced configuration settings in Wowza Streaming Cloud to perform a one-time setup of your preferred destinations, and you’ll be able to stream to multiple devices and platforms in one click.

2. Highest Quality on Facebook Live

Wowza ClearCaster now offers all users publishing access to the premium transcoding tier of Facebook Live. This tier offers more reliability and quality than the consumer side of Facebook Live by publishing via two additional output renditions (1080p and 144p), as well as support for up to 60fps video. Publish on the infrastructure Facebook built for premium content providers.

3. Free Titling & Graphics

Use any browser-based source with ClearCaster to add professional production and branding to your broadcast. Wowza has partnered with Vidpresso to create the perfect social streaming graphics. Use the standard packages for free, or pay a small one-time fee to have Vidpresso create a fully customized graphics package.

4. More Stream Health Metrics

ClearCaster now integrates with Facebook stream health to give you a full view of the first mile. New health monitoring metrics include real-time bitrate performance both coming out of the appliance as well as being ingested into Facebook.

Learn more about the Wowza here

Recently, I was supporting our CEO, Dave Stubenvoll, by providing an onsite customer demonstration of the Wowza ClearCaster appliance. Suddenly, right in the middle of our session, Dave intentionally pulled the 120-volt power cord from the unit.

While maintaining composure, on the inside, I was freaking out! In my mind, I screamed, “Dave, why would you do that?!”

What I didn’t yet realize was that the Wowza ClearCaster device is designed to automatically resume streaming when power is restored. This incident, while terrifying, actually showcased the resiliency of our ClearCaster hardware, and how it can consistently recover from a power outage.

The Fault-Tolerant Server Keeps Going, and Going…

In most instances, removing power—or disrupting a physical server in any capacity—is a very bad idea. Candidly, even having witnessed the ability of our branded hardware to recover from loss of power, the idea of showing that off in an on-site demo makes me a little nervous. Most of us in the industry shy away from “messing around” with a server once it’s up and running.

My friend, Richie Murray with Bridge Digital, would certainly disagree with me. Over a period of months, I had been running into Richie at various industry events, where he kept trying to get me excited me about a “fault-tolerant server” that he was convinced would be perfect for streaming. He claimed to have this device that would “keep on going” when any primary component became compromised during operation.

It sounded like a great idea, but I wasn’t sold. Prior to working with ClearCaster, I’ve worked with people all over the world, in every aspect of the industry, and have never encountered a situation where a media server could be compromised, yet “keep on going.”

Video streaming is complex and resource-intensive. The thought of a server maintaining a transcoding and packaging workflow—to a maximum scale—while losing a hard disk, power supply or motherboard component sounded very far-fetched to me. But then again, Richie is a stand-up guy, and I realized he may be onto something… read more

Let’s start with YouTube. While Facebook has gotten a lot of attention lately, YouTube offers some distinct advantages. Let’s consider audience first.

YouTube doesn’t have a newsfeed or pages or groups. All it has is video. Sure, there are channels and playlists, but they’re just a collection of videos. Even the discussions on YouTube are centered around videos.

So, it should come as no surprise that YouTube wants you to watch videos. In fact, they don’t care (for the most part) which videos you watch as long as you stay on YouTube to watch them.

With that said, newer videos tend to be more relevant to questions being asked, so YouTube tends to promote those. Since nothing is newer than live, anyone searching on YouTube (or Google for that matter) is likely to get some live, or recently live videos as part of the search.

That means that YouTube is good at showing videos to people who might be interested in them, but who have no prior relationship whatsoever with the creator.

This doesn’t come without a downside, though. Since Google is so huge and has such deep pockets, they’re a target for lawsuits. To combat this, Google created the contentID system for YouTube.

In negotiating with copyright owners, like record companies, they have created a system which enables their copyrighted works to be used or not and monetized or not. For most people, this system works fine. The problem comes when your church has permission, via the CCLI live-streaming license or the Christian Copyright Solutions’ license, to live stream copyrighted worship music, but YouTube doesn’t have a way to know that … or anyone to tell… read more

Biola University is a private Christian college in the Los Angeles area, with about 6,500 students across eight schools. In addition to broadcasting lectures, seminars and other educational content, Biola creates marketing videos to attract new students to attend.

Since many soon-to-be college students spend a lot of time on Facebook, this is a natural platform for Biola to use to share videos about what life is like on campus. The Wowza ClearCaster appliance offers an easy way to start streaming this content on Facebook to massive audiences of prospective students around the world. The ClearCaster workflow is also much simpler and more reliable than the previous setup Biola was using, which involved many pieces of equipment and manual encoder configuration.

In this video from the 2018 NAB Show, David Baxter, assistant director of video production at Biola, explains how ClearCaster has improved their Facebook Live streaming workflow and allowed them to engage with more prospective students more easily: click here to see the video

With this update, ClearCaster offers titling, redundancy in the Manager UI, features to create even better broadcasts, and more:

1. Titling & Graphics

The Wowza ClearCaster appliance now supports titling and graphics. Use any browser-based source with ClearCaster to add professional production and branding to your broadcast. Need help creating browser-based graphics? Wowza has partnered with Vidpresso to create the perfect social streaming graphics.

2. Redundancy in Manager

Bulletproof your broadcast by adding a redundant ClearCaster appliance to your workflow. With just one click, Wowza will automatically establish a redundant connection to Facebook, including encoding configuration, synchronization, and automated fail-over in case your primary connection goes down.

3. Rotated Vertical

Engage with Facebook Live in 1080p using the native social format of vertical video. Use your existing professional equipment to shoot sideways in the 16:9 format, and ClearCaster will rotate the video to 9:16.

4. Live Donate

Add the ability to ask viewers to donate to verified 501(c)(3) causes during your live stream. This API-only feature is now available to anyone broadcasting live with Wowza ClearCaster.

5. Other Enhancements

Even more features have been added to Wowza ClearCaster Manager. These include the ability to start simulcasting to Wowza Streaming Cloud while in preview, as well as a network-configuration tool to help you manually set an IP address and DNS and to debug your network connection.
For more information on release 1.0.4.17, visit these articles:

• Release Notes
• Add Titling and Graphics to a Broadcast
• How to Manage Network IP Settings
• Setup Redundant ClearCaster Live Streams

WOWZA CLEARCASTER SOFTWARE VERSION 1.0.3.10 IS NOW AVAILABLE ON ALL DEVICES!

With this update, ClearCaster offers exciting new features to create even more utility, including:

1. Simulcast to Any Destination
Facebook Live may be the world’s top live-streaming platform—but it isn’t the only platform. With the latest update, ClearCaster enables simulcasting functionality through integration with our industry-leading Wowza Streaming Cloud service. Just use the advanced configuration settings in Wowza Streaming Cloud to perform a one-time setup of your preferred destinations, and you’ll be able to stream to multiple devices and platforms in one click.

* Try it now by signing up for a Wowza Streaming Cloud trial.

2. Manage All Your Broadcasts in One Interface
For video professionals who have to schedule multiple broadcasts, managing them all can be a bit tricky. With the new Broadcast View in ClearCaster Manager, you can adjust the encoding resources; title and description; and stream targets for each live stream. This new feature will also allow you to start and stop streams from directly within the Broadcast View for greater control.

3. Audience Restriction for Targeted Broadcasts
While Facebook Live allows you to share your live stream with the entire world, sometimes that audience size is more than you need. Wowza ClearCaster now supports Facebook’s Audience Restriction functionality, which allows you to limit the visibility of Facebook Live posts only to audience members who meet your specific criteria for location, age and/or gender.

Geographic restrictions can be set at the country, state or locality level, so you can target coverage to as narrow or as broad an audience as you need. Setting up Audience Restrictions is quick and easy with the ClearCaster Manager UI.

Automatic Update to Version 1.0.3.10

Unlike previous ClearCaster software updates, version 1.0.3.10 will automatically update on appliances. The release window will be on June 14th between 7:00 a.m. MST and 8:00 a.m. MST.

If ClearCaster is powered on during the release window, the update will load automatically. However, if ClearCaster is powered down during the release window, the software will load the next time ClearCaster is powered on.

For more information, visit these articles:

Release Notes
Simulcast Documents