Livestream

A livestream is in practice a small control room set up next to the hall. Two or three cameras, a vision mixer, a dedicated sound engineer taking audio straight from the desk in the room, and someone watching the chat and the health of the stream. It is built half a day to a day ahead and rehearsed for real, with the speakers' slides, not just colour bars.

Why clients care: a hybrid company conference with two hundred people in the room and several hundred online. The online viewer has none of the patience of the room. Twenty minutes of a static shot of a screen and they are gone. That is why you pay for direction on a livestream, not for resolution. The gap in price between one camera and a properly directed stream is roughly double.

How it runs: a site visit, an internet check, agreement on who controls the broadcast channel, and a run of show including the breaks between blocks. You supply an exact schedule, the slides in advance and permission to film from the speakers. Expect the crew on site from early morning. The backup is always a second connection over mobile data plus a parallel recording in the cameras.

Where it gets oversold: four cameras for a one hour event with a single speaker at a lectern. Interactivity is overrated the same way; chat, polls and audience questions only work when someone moderates them live, otherwise you get an empty box next to the picture. The recording can later become an aftermovie, but only if a second camera has been picking up details all along.

Before every stream we run what we call a failure drill: during rehearsal someone deliberately unplugs the main internet line and we time how long the stream takes to come back on the backup. Until you test it, you do not know whether the backup works. Ask your supplier to do it, even if they would rather not.