Understanding Live Streaming

Live streaming has seen a huge uptick in popularity in recent years, but it's still a relatively new form of media. As it continues to evolve, what is live streaming and what are its benefits?  Lynn Elliott, Senior Product Manager of Wirecast, is here to discuss.

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Transcription

Mason Paine: It's no secret that live streaming has exploded in popularity in recent years, but it's also important to remember that it's still a relatively new form of media as such. It has evolved rapidly and changed a lot over the past decade while senior product manager of Wirecast Lynn Elliott joins me to speak about all things stream.

Mason Paine: Thanks for joining me, Lynn.

Lynn Elliott: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Mason Paine: Can you explain to me how streaming works and try to use the layman's terms?

Lynn Elliott: Yes. Sure. So live streaming is really, or the term streaming means the continuous transmission of video or audio from a host to a client. So this kind of works by breaking up the data into little bits, known as packets.

Lynn Elliott: you transmit those packets across the internet. So each packet is independently addressed and traveled separately. So imagine like, if you were trying to send a textbook to a friend, you would take out a page and send it and take out another page and send it. And these all might arrive at different times, but when it comes to streaming over the internet, Users or viewers like you, and I would use a player to kind of assemble all of those pages together in the right order, and then be able to watch that, or in this case in test textbook, read that, as a continuous piece of media.

Lynn Elliott: And so the internet has made this all possible, by the bandwidth that we have today is greatly improved over the past, you know, 20 years. And so you're able to send more and more higher and higher quality, bits of data over the internet. So then you can, watch that, as it, as it's live.

Lynn Elliott: So then there's, You know, the differentiation between watching something like on from Netflix that is, you're technically you're streaming something it's typically not live. It's something that's stored on a server somewhere. And you're getting those bits across the internet, in their packets and watching that stored media on your player, which happens to be your TV or your iPad or wherever you watch it.

Lynn Elliott: And then as compared to what we call live streaming, which is a live event. That's being streamed as it's happening. Live. The streaming is technically happening in the same way it's being encoded and sent as bits across the internet so that a player on the other end can, assemble those bits, and you can watch.

Mason Paine: Now I wanted to focus on the live streaming portion of this., what is a proper setup for that? I mean, could you just use your cell?

Lynn Elliott: Oh, yeah, sure. Lots of people use their cell phones and you can, you know, use an app like Facebook and Facebook has a feature called Facebook live. You can, you can click on that and that gives you everything you need to stream live to Facebook.

Lynn Elliott: So typically what you need is a camera and audio, and then you need internet. Of course. And then you need some sort of encoding software to take that camera and audio data, encode it into these packet. And send it across the internet to a place where somebody else can watch it. And so, yeah, you can, you can use something like that.

Lynn Elliott: The Facebook app, which has everything included, it accesses your phone, camera, microphone. It's got the encoding software built into it, which encodes and sends to Facebook.,