Broadcast Your Meetings with Zoom and Livecast Media

When it comes to online events, things tend to get a little bit confusing. There are webcasts and then there are webinars. There are broadcasts, video conferences, encoders, webcams, Zoom, webRTC, RTMP. The list is long. Figuring out what exactly you need for your event can be a daunting task.

Video conferencing tools such as Zoom bring us together in a virtual room where all parties can talk to each other in almost real time. This is powerful - and life saving when we have relatively small number of participants.

But there are some cases where we have many attendees and just a few speakers. We don't need and want all our attendees to share their webcam videos with everyone else. Think of it like a conference room full of viewers watching a panel discussion taking place on the stage. The stage. This is the key. When there is a stage and viewers watching what's happening on that stage, a video conferencing solution will not fully help us. Online courses with large number of attendees, quarterly financial updates, town hall meetings are just some examples to this.

What we need then is a one way broadcast from the event location towards the viewers rather than everyone connecting to each other. Of course, our viewers should have some tools to interact with the presenters on the stage like asking questions or participating in polls, but we will discuss those in another article. This type of broadcast is called a webcast - a broadcast taking place on the web.

In normal times, we would hire a video production company to do a high quality webcast for us. The production team would arrive in our location with their cameras, video switchers, cables, encoders and various other equipment to record and broadcast our event as it unfolds on the stage.

But in COVID-19 times things are different. We don't have a physical location for our events. Our speakers are all at their homes. Where are we going to invite the production team? Where is our stage? The answer is actually not far away. By combining Zoom and Livecast Media we can achieve this. All we need to do is to bring our speakers together on a virtual stage (a Zoom meeting) and then broadcast this meeting as it happens to the wider audience in a secure and branded environment (a Livecast Media event page). 

Zoom has a feature called Custom Live Streaming. When enabled, this feature allows meeting hosts to broadcast their meetings to a custom endpoint - such as a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, or in our case a Livecast Media event page. All we need to do is to create an event on Livecast Media, obtain the RTMP URL and the stream key provided to us and enter this information into our Zoom meeting's settings.

Let's get to the step by step instructions.

On Livecast Media

1. Go to the Settings tab for your event, then select Channel. Click on the green plus sign to create a new live stream channel.

2. Once your channel is created, it is always a good practice to give it a name. Enter a name and click on the Save Channel Settings button.

3. Click on the View Channel Details button. This will open up a pop-up window with the information for your channel. What we are interested in are the Server URL, Stream Key and the Embed Code. We will enter the first two into our meeting settings on Zoom later. The embed code will be placed on our event page. Click on the Embed Code to copy it to the clipboard, and close the pop-up window.

4. Now go to Video tab to view the Video Settings for your event. Paste your embed code into the Embed Your Video section. You can also click on the Make Your Video Visible Now option if you like. If this is checked, as soon as you start broadcasting on your channel, your live video will be visible to your viewers on the event page.

5. Things are looking good on the Livecast Media side! Now let's set up our Zoom.

On Zoom 

1. You need a Pro Account on Zoom in order to activate the Custom Live Streaming feature. 

2. In Zoom, go to Personal Settings and then select Meeting.

3. Click on In Meeting (Advanced) section and turn on Allow live streaming meetings setting. Then select the option Custom Live Streaming Service.

4. You will need to do the previous steps only once. Now that you have enabled the feature all that remains is to edit settings for your personal meeting room (or you create a new meeting) on Zoom and enter your Livecast Media channel's settings there. Under Personal Settings section, select Meetings, then select Personal Meeting Room.

5. Scroll down all the way, you will see a box with the title Live Streaming. Click on configure live streaming settings. This will open a pop-up dialog, where you will enter the stream URL and the stream key of your Livecast Media channel. Zoom also requires you to enter a URL for the live streaming page, you can enter your Livecast Media event's web address there. When you are done, click Save to save these settings.

6. All done! When you start your Zoom meeting, you can click on the More button, select Live on Custom Streaming Service and your meeting will be live on your Livecast Media event page.

Happy streaming! :)

Livecast Media Team