Best Settings for Publishing an Interactive Live Stream on Your Own Website

Justin Miller:

Let’s look at the best settings for broadcasting an interactive live stream to your own website with Wowza Streaming Cloud. And to begin in Wowza Streaming Cloud, we’re going to create a live stream by going to Live Streams and choosing Add Live Stream. I’m going to name this live stream Denver Interactive, and for the location closest to me, since we are in Colorado, I’m going to choose US West. Next, I need to decide how I’m going to send my stream to Wowza Streaming Cloud. Now, many of you may be using something like OBS Studio as your encoder, in which case you’ll choose Other RTMP, but I’d like to do it through my browser. So I’m going to choose Web Browser (WebRTC). For billing, I’m going to leave it pay as you go since my sessions are probably going to only be 20 to 30 minutes long. I’d like it to be adaptive bitrate so I’m going to leave it alone. That way, the bitrate changes depending on the internet connection speed for those people on mobile devices.

I’m also going to say, Yes, create an HLS stream with reduced latency. This is interactive, and that way the latency changes from a 30-45 second latency down to maybe 6-12 seconds. I’m going to leave the aspect ratio at 720P because that’s the max really for WebRTC. I’m going to choose, Yes, create a VOD stream for this live stream, that way I have a simple link that I can switch out to, to watch the VOD from the website. And I’m also going to say Yes, record this live stream. That way at the end, I have a video file I can store for posterity. Now for type of closed captions, I’m going to say None because I don’t have any. And next, I’m not going to worry about playback settings because we’re not going to be using the players that are given here to which all the settings relate to. And I’m also Next on the other page, not going to host the webpage in Wowza Streaming Cloud, because like we said, we’re going to use our own website.

So I’ll click Next again and verify all my settings and then click Finish, and our settings are then stored, and now I can go live. Once I go live, I will be incurring charges. Another thing I should mention is that because we are doing this via WebRTC, we have this option for a publish page. I can go into the publish page. I can check my audio settings, maybe make sure it’s using my headset. I can also go in and maybe share my screen if I want to. But instead of doing that, I think I’m going to just use my webcam.

Once we are streaming live, I can then go and click Publish. And now, as you can see, we’re live. If I go into Wowza Streaming Cloud, I can verify we’re live by looking at the thumbnail, which changes every five seconds, as well as look at our statistics for connection, seeing our amount of viewers. And the next thing I’ll need to do is take this HLS URL and put it on my website.

Now, I’ve created a sample website in WordPress because it’s interactive. I have set up a way people can talk to each other here. I could, say, go in as myself and say, “Hello everyone.” So this is a great way people can chat with each other, as well as ask me questions during the presentation. This is currently the code that’s in there. I’m using a basic plugin called RumbleTalk that’s for WordPress. I’m not into any of the advanced features yet that allow more users, that does cost money. Right now, I’ve just set it up for five users, and that’s free. As well, we’re going to use FV Player. Again, for more functionality, it does cost, but I’m using it at the standard setup. And I’m just going to add new for… Sorry. If I said VF Player before, it is FV Player, and here I can paste in the video URL and that’s all I’m going to do. I’m just going to Save that right there, and it generates it here along with the code. I’m just going to copy that code and I am going to paste it above RumbleTalk. So now I can click Update. And now if I reload, here I am right at the top so people can watch me while I, well, answer questions from the chat box below. Like I said, there is a little bit of a lag. As you can see, it’s already talking about reloading right now. So there is a about a nine, nine second delay in there. But again, that’s not so bad for people who are answering questions from a text box. You don’t have to have an immediate response to everything, especially when you’re doing a presentation and you already have information that you’re giving out.

Once this is done, I can go in and Stop my live stream as well as Stop it in Wowza Streaming Cloud. Now, now that it’s stopped, I would like a way for people to see the VOD asset. So, under Advanced, as you can see, there are two options, Recording, and the VOD Streams. If you recall, I checked both of these when setting up this live stream. So under Recording, I could go in and grab the recording for the live stream, but as you can see, it’s still converting it to a file. So under VOD Streams, there is my stream completed. I can click on that and grab the playback URL.

So I’m just going to copy that URL. And I can just go again into FV Player, paste that in, Save it. Now, all I need to do is switch it from seven to eight. So I’m going to go and edit this. I’m going to switch it to an eight. And if I ever want to go back, I can just switch it to a seven. I probably want to go in and add some splash screens too. That will help distinguish the difference between the recording versus the live stream. And then I can just reload this. In here, you can see the live stream. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a way for me to mute it so I’m just going to pause it right now. But again, it’s advanced features that you can pay for if you wish to. That’s really it. If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support at Wowza. Other than that, thanks for watching and happy streaming.