Overview
When setting up your live stream event using Subsplash Live, you now have the option to use a pre-recorded video to simulate a live stream experience for your users. Simulating a live stream is great for situations where you might want to create a live experience for your users, but you might not have the time or manpower to pull off an additional live event. Follow these steps to set up your simulated live stream!
How To
Navigate to the Live section within your App Dashboard
Select Create Live Stream
Select Simulated-live and click or drag to upload the MP4 file of your choice.
Set your Date & Time for your event, fill out the event details, and select Schedule.
That's it!
You can now focus on adding your live event to your app or sharing and embedding your live event by checking out these resources:
Best Practices
To be sure that you can use this tool to the best of your ability here are some recommendations!
Content
First are some beginning and ending buffers! It is very common for large productions to add a few minutes of content to the beginning and end of a Simulated live video. This can be a countdown, slide deck, welcome video, etc. There is some evidence to suggest that 3 minutes is the ideal length of time for a pre-stream and post-stream buffer, but the specific length you decide to use is up to you. Just know that the first few seconds of a simulated live video can often be cut off on syndication platforms, so adding a buffer ensures that only the buffer will get cut short and not your actual content!
Encoding
For encoding recommendations, you'll find everything you need to know here: What encoding settings should I use for Subsplash Live?
Scheduling
When it comes to scheduling your live streams and uploading your files, there are some things to know:
To ensure simulated live videos are fully queued up prior to their broadcast time, the scheduler requires at least 5 full minutes between scheduling time and broadcast start.
To help produce a quality stream, we attempt to create a transcoded copy of the file you upload and stream out that copy, though like any transcoding process, this has the possibility to fail. If it does fail, we try to stream out the original file that you uploaded rather than the transcoded copy.
At the same time, to keep storage usage down, we archive the original file after 5 days. If the transcoding failed or we didn't have time to complete it before the stream, and we try to fall back on the original file only to discover that it has been archived already, then we will have no source file to broadcast for the stream and the stream will not take place.
Because of these facts, we recommend uploading your simulated live stream video no less than 24 hours before your scheduled start time and no more than 5 days before your scheduled start time. This will give you the highest chance of a successful stream even in the event of transcoding issues!