How Will AI Change Your Streaming Business?

AI is the buzz term of 2024, and indeed, tech companies have put a lot of resources and commitment into adding or improving AI components in their products and services. The term AI covers a wide swath of technologies, but for this column, I'll focus mainly on generative AI, or services that can generate human-like output based on input that we humans provide.

IBC 2024: Better Content Curation Through Conversation with Imaginario AI

One AI-driven solution that stood out at IBC 2024 as particularly smart and creative comes from a London-based company called Imaginario AI. I met with CEO and Co-Founder Jose M. Puga and got an up-close look at a content indexing and curation tool that uses multimodal AI models to "make video content searchable like text." Imaginario AI made a big enough splash at IBC this year to take home 1st prize in the "Manage" category of the IABM's BaM awards.

Orphaned Tech: Struggles With Legacy NDI Gear

Not every new customer has the bank to buy all new gear. It's typical to buy used gear, get it running, and then upgrade only as the need and cash flow dictate. But a challenge comes with using older NDI gear.

Streaming Is Easy, Until It’s Not

When it comes to electronics, it's easy to look at advertised features and believe that tech will provide everything you need. But no matter how powerful and integrated it is—perhaps even because of how integrated and powerful it is—you need professionals to run it to ensure you look your best. Streaming may seem easy, but as with any business role, only expertise will make it look easy, even when it's not.

The Lure of New Gear

As the march of new tech accelerates, it begs the question: Do we wait a bit to see what new gear can offer, or do we go with what's available now, even if might seem a bit older

All-in-One Streaming Tools Let You Do It All—But Should You?

Today, we are seeing a similar conglomeration of features and abilities in today's production hardware, enabling one person to "do it all!" This begs the question: Should you do it all?

For Live Streaming Producers, Tables of Gear Are Still a Good Idea

While the All-In-One live production and streaming tools grow and mature, let's make sure we keep backup solutions in mind to ensure a successful production—even if it still means a table full of gear.

With Social Video Sizing, Serve Your Viewers What They’re Hungry For

The customer wanting to watch your stream on Insta does not want a horizontal video shoehorned into a vertical frame. The customer watching the horizontal version doesn't want the vertical slice with the same thing blurred out behind it to fill the frame. Each of those customers is hungry for that particular experience. It's your job to give your customers what they are hungry for.

8 Lessons Surfing Can Teach Live Streaming Producers

I had the opportunity to try and learn to surf earlier this year. I'm very glad that I took the lessons because I soon found out how hard surfing really is. While trying, failing, getting hurt, watching, and learning, I saw some parallels between my lessons on the water and the streaming business—which isn't quite as easy as it looks either.

‘Bulletproof’ Needs to Be a Standard Feature for Production Gear

There's a lot more imperfect gear on the market than ever before—gear we can't count on from gig to gig. Gear that can't deliver reliable video. Features that work and then don't. Devices that connect and then don't. We've lost core reliability. Bulletproof needs to be a feature.

Producing for FAST? Take it Slow

FAST programming needs space for the commercials. Unless you intentionally craft that space into your show, it just slices into your content randomly, ruining the mood of narrative content and frustrating viewers just as the show was getting to the "good part." Watching YouTube content on a Roku device is like this now. The random "pop" to commercials in the middle of a scene is very annoying.

Why Aren’t You Streaming Your Live Event?

These days, the cost and technological barriers to live streaming are few are far between. Robert Reinhardt outlines some reasons why organizations may still hesitate to live stream their events, and he shows why these reasons are misguided. He breaks down the ways that even events with small budgets can still produce high-quality live streams.

What Else Did We Get Wrong?

Based on what I'm hearing from a wide array of streaming producers, the heightened demand for streaming live events that we expected to be a natural outcome of its COVID-era ascendancy is either evaporating or simply hasn't materialized.

Follow-the-Presenter Tools for DIY Instructional Videos

Until fairly recently, if a teacher wanted to produce a DIY instructional video untethered to a fixed point in front of a camera, they'd need to remotely control either a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) head or a multicamera switcher. With the arrival of competent and inexpensive facial recognition software, several consumer videoconferencing cameras now offer automatic framing to allow teachers or other presenters to move around a scene to better engage with viewers and interact with props and visual aids.

Cloud-Based Streaming Production and the Sound of Inevitability

The production and communication tools we use are ever-more tied to the cloud, and to take advantage of it is to open a door of possibility and additional capability. Where do you want to go today?

5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Streaming Role with AI on the Rise

How do you keep your skills relevant and useful regardless of developments in AI, Machine Learning (ML), or more advanced automation in any process related to your role in streaming media? Whether you are a seasoned veteran or just starting out with your career, I recommend setting five goals for the coming year.

Can Better Video Help the Metaverse?

Will the metaverse have legs? Will the headsets currently in use suffer a fate similar to the PocketPC precursors to the smartphones we know and love today? Only time—and a lot more investment in tech by a wider range of companies and individuals—will tell.

From Remote to On-Prem Events: The Pendulum Swings

The pendulum has swung back away from streaming for a brief period, but COVID opened millions of eyes to the power, capability, and convenience of streaming—for the providers and the attendees. It also helped a lot of people realize that it's not as easy as it looks. I see the end result moving that pendulum toward more streaming—and more kinds of streaming—in the near future

Everybody’s Streaming

While you were busy streaming, what you think of as "streaming" evolved in­to many different things. Today, what you do when "streaming" is but one small piece of the streaming world.

Teaching With Dante

A commonly used streaming media technology at schools, conference centers, and houses of worship is Dante (Digital Audio Network Through Ethernet). A Dante-enabled device can be plugged into a Dante network using a standard Category 5e or Category 6 network cable; the network connects devices using either 100Mbps or gigabit network switches, typically with Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities.