Live events are the most immersive and powerful forms of communication. For centuries, knowledge has been passed on through stories and demonstrations. The act of standing with someone and engaging on that level is among the most human experiences, making events one of the most powerful ways to reach, motivate, and educate viewers. And while social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr have enabled worldwide mass communication, nothing comes close to actual physical interaction. With current internet video distribution technology, the details have been relegated to what can be seen on the flat screen of consumer monitors – a limitation that has thus far kept the web from competing with face-to-face meetings or truly augmenting TV. Businesses and artists, in particular, can’t afford to lose the details of interaction with their viewers and customers, details that are inevitably lost when the live portion is replaced by time-shifted viewing, no matter how meticulous the recording process.

The equation is simple: the more people who can engage with and attend live events, the more who will. This is as true for a high school football game as it is for a religious service or an annual all-hands meeting at a large corporation. But until now, the technology has been much too expensive or difficult to deploy.

Importance of Live Video Streaming Services in Modern Events

Prior to discussing several practical aspects related to using live event video streaming, we will be dealing with the principles and motives that can explain the methods we developed to meet user requirements and the corresponding technologies that are currently found in the live event live streaming business. In other words, we can only better design our live event video streaming solutions if we understand its reasoning and the underlying technologies. It is fundamental to properly understand how live event broadcasting works today in order to be able to discuss and criticize the technologies in use.

Because of recent advances in internet technology, the live video streaming industry has become massive, offering a wide range of services and solutions to its users and viewers. The live video streaming business is therefore ever-improving, thanks to the countless providers who are working to improve the technology and service day by day. In this day and age, the camera, combined with the internet, is used for more tasks than just sharing photos. The internet has completely revolutionized fields like journalism, sports documentation, and entertainment. It is currently true of events: the number and size of events, as well as their localities, are not limitations on a person’s participation. This chapter is not a review of current technology in the matter of live event live streaming. It is a bird’s eye view of those technologies, along with their workflow and some theoretical observations.

Evolution of Events: From In-Person to Virtual and Hybrid Events

Physical events present a set of limitations, which have been noticed over the centuries. People who wanted and could afford to attend an event, by buying a ticket or paying membership fees, might not be physically able to travel to a specific place and attend the event. In response to these limitations, other types of events started to thrive, such as the conference, the workshop, or the trade show that are focused mainly on business, educational, and networking opportunities. The field of sport began to face similar limitations, with athletes not being able to attend the Olympic Games due to fears and the tumultuous state of affairs in society. It was because of these limitations that events and gatherings like these began to revolutionize, stationing themselves among the most iconic and unforgettable ones to ever take place in history.

The world has embraced events and in-person gatherings since ancient times, yet they have continually kept evolving. The first sporting event that ever took place was the Olympic Games, and it began around 776 BC in Olympia, Greece. Considering the type of event, the number of days it usually took place, the number of people attending, and the amount of money generated by the 2016 event, the modern Olympics Games is the largest sports event in the world. Similar proportions of growth have been seen in other fields as well, where some events, such as concert tours, also generate millions to billions of dollars and are attended by millions of people over several nights.

Traditional In-Person Events

Internally, live video streaming events allow for more efficient, effective, and affordable CEO messaging, all-hands meetings, and trainings. When integrated into a business model, live video streaming can be a valuable marketing tool, providing opportunities to broadcast events and gain additional coverage in all types of media. By leveraging the power of social media, such as high-quality content, to a larger event structure, from video workshops to industry conferences, live video adds buzz and excitement, solidly builds a brand ambassador program, and provides marketing data to help companies better engage participants during actual events.

Conferences, conventions, trade shows, and live events, in general, are essential parts of business strategy. Now, in the age of social media and a 24/7 news cycle, the way information is disseminated has changed. Whenever anyone in any industry is asked to share thoughts on potential new event ideas, they consider the new options available to conduct business and to pass their information, thoughts, and expertise through social media and live video streaming events. 365 Live and on-demand video streaming of any kind is a powerful way to reach your target audience, whether you are an individual, small business, or a multinational corporation. In the age of social media and video streaming, there’s an easy way for anyone to produce high-quality content, create a TV-like experience, and share it with the world. Businesses and individuals are embracing opportunities for wider exploration of revenue-generating products and services.

Virtual Events

Virtual events offer live or recorded content which occurs in real time. This means that a virtually situated person may view the occurrence as it happens, or witness a pre-recorded event which can be viewed at the viewer’s convenience. The livestream can easily be shared to a big screen for those watching in the company of others. Posts about the live event are made on social media and conveniently shared.

Physical events provide unparalleled value over a virtual platform. They provide an opportune atmosphere for networking, promote brand engagement and customer retention, and most essentially, allow the company and potential customers to interact. To leverage the dynamism and uniqueness of a physical event and offer an experience that truly adds value, virtual event opportunities provide a perfect platform that is cost-effective. With the help of live video streaming services, viewers have access to information irrespective of their geographic location or time of day. Compatible with desktop, tablet, or smartphone, easy customizations allow users to raise questions, share content on social media with a single press of the button, and record sessions within seconds.

Hybrid Events

The hybrid event’s added value for an offline audience is enhanced since companies can take advantage of creating broad-reaching live session featured event content that can be watched from anywhere online at the same time. Attendees have the ability to watch featured sessions and meet the speakers fully, learn more about the brand and sponsor’s product portfolios, cull useful insights, and share tweets or blog posts discussing specific strategies. Participants include speakers and delegates who attended the event in person, remote audiences who watch the live stream, and a group of event organizers who work to connect the entire community before, during, and after the event.

Hybrid events are a combination of physical and virtual experiences. They are typically structured as in-person events that are broadcast online, involving a physical audience interacting with live speakers and discussion, but they also feature a strong virtual component allowing a remote audience to view these activities and participate to a specific extent. Hybrid events aim to deliver an unmissable in-person event for all of the people who are able to be there, and an incredible online event for everyone else, allowing brands to be in more places in their event strategy. There are usually significant costs associated with the physical presence for the audience, as well as low-cost ticket types for the streaming option. In fact, they can be designed so that the virtual audience really benefits from their work involvement, usually performing networking, collaboration, and specific application activities that otherwise could not be performed.

Key Components of Live Video Streaming Services

The digital video/audio data needs to be compressed to remove redundancy, thus reducing the amount of data to be carried through the network and stored on storage devices. Video/audio compression has been an active area of research for several decades. Introduced in the late 1980s, the MPEG-1 standard is targeted at video CD applications, while the MPEG-2 standard is designed for DVD-quality video and cable/DTH television. More recent is the MPEG-4 standard, which defines audiovisual coding of arbitrary objects. To extend the capabilities of existing and emerging networks (e.g. wireless, mobile networks), the MPEG committee has defined a simple profile. In recent years, a number of MPEG-4 audiovisual coding schemes compliant with the simple profile have been developed and are available on the market. Another interesting scheme for very low bit-rate video coding is the ITU-T H.324 video coding standard for video telephony over conventional telephone lines.

At the beginning of the chain in live video streaming services, there are physical video/audio sources which could be: TV cameras, video servers, cable systems, satellite receivers, video capture objects. The purpose of the acquisition layer is to take an analog signal and convert it into a digital signal. Different techniques can be employed for acquiring digital video and audio data. At a large sporting event, there will be many such devices capturing live gameplay and sending the data feed to the network. The video captured could be produced in any format such as NTSC, PAL, SECAM, etc., or any forms of digital video data.

Event Platforms and Event Management Systems

For organizations, when they want to host an event, they need an interface to schedule and hold the event. However, the platforms used to schedule the events are not developed with the objective of emulating the physical event in an online platform but are merely capable of handling the resource scheduling. The fact that Eventbrite is limited to the ability to handle only in-person events explicitly implies that it is not meant as an online social service platform that caters to the corporate usher providing live information to the audience members regarding the event.

Event management has long been facilitated with the use of tools employed to create and manage the virtual or online settings of a professional business or social event. Most event management algorithms, also known as event organizers or professional event management systems, require the use of double- or multi-sided platforms where event managers can interact and discuss the nature of the events with service providers. A popular platform used to organize peer-to-peer interactions between event organizers and service providers, especially for corporate events including video streaming events, is the Eventbrite platform. However, it does not provide integrated live service for the corporate usher, a service complementary to the auditorium usher service that can be used to provide information regarding the in-progress event.

Streaming Process: Audio and Video Considerations

Creating appropriate scenarios and developing ways to promote these uses is expected to occur organically and although they are a natural use of the technology, this paper focuses on the underlying system enabling a wide variety of these and perhaps unanticipated uses. Our goals are therefore to provide a system that makes it easy to integrate all aspects of the production of a live event into a form that is suitable for live broadcast over the internet. The focus is primarily on the production of a high-quality signal, suitable for synchronously streaming audio and video. In particular, this paper provides guidelines for designing the event, capturing the audio and video, and mixing or ‘switching’ multiple audio and video inputs for real-time broadcast of a live event. Other requirements, such as marketing, user management, or e-commerce, are addressed by integrated third-party services or could be implemented via bespoke services. Aside from being able to be used for live events, the integrated authoring tools and content management system allows the automated archiving of searchable content. Archive material can be presented in a separately configured manner with an emphasis on discoverability, and is suitable for asynchronous playback, as well as traditional web-triggered download. Community-building around content is encouraged by the embedding of social feedback directly into the system. Finally, by integrating with existing tools, developers may build novel highly interactive web experiences and applications around venue content.

Our focus of investigation with regards to the topics of interest is the process of streaming live video and audio from a live event to a remote audience. This envisions a situation where the remote audience becomes very large and cannot be accommodated by the venues, although it is not a limitation of the approach that follows. Musicians and clubs could stream concerts to homes, DJs could be in their homes and stream live to the web, events could be broadcast in virtual reality, and so-called global parties could involve large groups of people with low-cost equipment. Events like the running of the bulls in Pamplona could be viewed from the perspective of the spectator, while potential encounters of interest in field science or exploration could be broadcast to everyone at a remote site for decision making or just watching.

Choosing a Live Streaming Platform

When picking up an event live streaming platform, a few things should come into consideration: 1. Know your audience: Ensure the experience that is tailored to meet the specific needs and needs of your audience. Many live streaming platforms lack the robust feature sets needed to drive an audience’s real emotion. Your audience is moving and their expectations are maturing. Their conventional TV experiences have influenced their viewing habits, creating increasing demand for higher experience quality for live event content. Many networks buying sports broadcasts are demanding an experience that can match what they currently have on their cable TV channels.

Choosing an online video platform (OVP) is an essential step when you are ready to live stream your event. However, with more smart data use than ever before and a stronger set of features and technology, how can you make the right decisions for your event? Those are some key things to think about while looking through several live streaming platforms. Security and how latency affects the audience’s ability to interact with the content. After that comes the business, including revenue generalization, how you can publish your content to both on-demand and live streams within the system and which kind of support is provided when things go wrong.

Case Studies and Examples of Successful Event Streaming Platforms

Onaframework was used to provide support for an architecture that includes logical-level connection to a Linux gateway, where MagmaBSIP can be used to encode and prepare the video for streaming. Last year, Queen Win Hotel & Casino in Milwaukee worked with Hotel News Now to offer a webcasting platform that allowed investment analysts to attend the results of quarterly meetings without leaving company headquarters. The framework shows how complex the content delivery system is due to multiple providers and different features, such as high-definition, medium definition, and low definition. Another case study on video webcasting and live archival was developed and exhibited by Ustream, which, through different API routes, allows interest-information media centers to send their live-streamed video feeds to their online showcase.

According to researchers from UiTM University, on August 12, 2015, Niterete Bhd. created the first cloud-based live webcast platform with more than 100,000 active users in over 300 institutes. The webcast was broadcasted in 22 distinct regions and experienced bandwidth constraints that can be overcome using a hybrid approach of the cloud-based content delivery and dynamic adaptive streaming. The testbed consisted of 12 cloud-based agents that orchestrated the content distribution; a headend that encoded content and chose the most efficient agents and regions to send content; and a cloud-based dump to handle obfuscations of different regions in resolving perfect HLS playlists. The approach was successfully validated in 22 regions, with Malaysia being the head of the testbed, 200 high-definition tunnels, and 300 low-definition tunnels. On October 14, 2015, the World News Magazine announced that then the United States President Barack Obama initiated a special event for students under the Kids Science program, in which he participated in the generation of Gigabit+ feeds to Florida, Indiana, and Texas. Students were able to transmit their DNA from their classrooms so bio students could process it and send it back to President Obama in another format. Responding to the largest DNA distribution event in the world, Google Fiber announced that it would work with the Netflix streaming ARM to launch a real gigabit HLS streaming service over the Internet.

Conclusion and Future Trends

In this perspective, standard-based approaches may help to define well-suited solutions and to manage problems at the different levels of an evolving stack of technology and protocols. Finally, despite rich user interfaces, the users’ proficiency and their modalities of interaction management have both crucial effects on perceived QoE and UX, and still present wide and unsettled open issues.

As a matter of fact, much more research on live streaming video services has to be directed towards understanding and overcoming the different problems of the proposed solutions, as well as the QoE assessment of provided services with a specific focus on both advertised or possibly actual content delivery. Furthermore, scalability and performance of the different infrastructures – meant as serving cloud systems as well as the platform’s technology stack itself – have crucial effects on the end-users’ perceived QoE and must be accurately taken into account.

In this chapter, we have addressed this wide issue through the classification, characteristics, and comparison of leading streaming services with different business models and purposes. The last part of the chapter has addressed some real-world situations in which live video streaming services have been surprisingly used in scientific, educational, or sports scenarios. However, the listed described services and their detailed characteristics are just a small subset that may influence the plenty of choices and the countless solutions that may be defined over the span of the growing streaming market.

Live video streaming services revolutionize event organization and marketing by providing both event organizers and end users a low-cost and scalable platform for their purposes. Additionally, streaming services allow users to choose how to participate in an event according to their requirements and interests, and also allow massive crowds to experience an event without the physical need of attending an event’s venue.

Future Trends and Innovations

Despite this vibrant landscape of live event video streaming, a question that lingers is what can be expected in the future? The trends and innovations in telecommunication technologies in the coming years are likely to see changes in content delivery, user interaction with the content, and audience interaction with the streamers. The ongoing quest for an increase in bandwidth and a decrease in latency is expected to evolve, with a priority in telecommunication research being given to the enhancement of network management strategies, more efficient compression algorithms, and physical layer interfaces between antenna and fiber.

One of the key areas that are expected to undergo major advances is AI, and it is anticipated that the future will see amalgamations of AI and strategic targeting by corporate houses. In event-based live streaming, AI’s key contributions will be the personalization of streams as per the preferences and type of event and the automations that could facilitate the increase in the number of events being covered. At the customer end, there are also emergent AR and VR-based technologies that connect content and audience. The productions of AR and VR streams present further immersive experiences. These technologies are expected to grow gradually, with reductions in costs. The growing theoretical and technical novelties in digital live streaming depict the proliferation of video streaming in the coming years, and the industry expects many innovations that are still unpredictable. Stakeholders in the digital content field are unlikely to underestimate such swift changes, and those with more adaptive advantages are certain to come out as winners.

Emerging Technologies in Live Streaming

The future of livestreaming technology continues to be developed and advanced every year, shaping the way we watch live event video streaming. This trend of innovation is driving reliability and quality to new heights. On the infrastructure layer, streaming protocols have increasingly moved toward techniques designed to ensure effective delivery of live online video while compensating for packet loss. The internet has been upgraded as well, with multicloud architecture and serverless services being more widely adopted. Having multiple clouds in different regions provides edge access, ensuring that delivery nodes in network locations are as close to viewers as possible.

5G, the fifth generation of mobile communication technology, further significantly accelerates new possibilities in live streaming, offering higher speeds, lower latency, and far more network capacity than 4G. While every other incremental network advancement did little to affect the media landscape, having greater numbers of people who can watch a streamed event in any location leads to significant changes in coverage and potential audience. Mobile streaming undergoes rapid progress as higher device and infrastructure capability, plus new interactive features, continue to outpace fixed connectivity. Perhaps the most crucial advancement of all is circumventing home routing and firewall complexity by delivering completely within the cloud: cloud-based systems are all using cloud-based systems to broadcast events straight from the site in order to expand exhibition possibilities and grow audiences.

Several characteristics define advanced live streaming. Innovative real-time audience participation is one: we can do global real-time polling, public or private Q&A for a specific audience, or opinion gathering, use metrics to adapt content on the fly, and in general come up with any outside-the-box ideas which unlock new forms of engagement and ensure participants feel part of the event, making modern events much more compelling. Specifically, blending a physical audience with a virtual one has value now. During a two-day global cryptocurrency launch recently, imploring blockchain enthusiasts to congregate for a large gallery event, the company co-founder appeared on stage in holographic form and quite effectively generated some social media heat around these pop-up locales, drawing over a thousand attendees in total who were lining up the street to the block.

AI Integration

AI is emerging as an increasingly important area in live event video streaming. Streaming has an acute need for content delivery and customer experiences to be second to none. AI offers a range of tools and techniques for monitoring video performance and identifying viewer preferences. Implementing AI can optimize operations and drive efficiencies for live event video streaming services. Automated content moderation is increasingly seen as a way to stop unacceptable content from going live and reducing distrust in platforms. By using media-specific machine learning models trained with large modern content sets, AI can provide real-time metrics on how “good” a stream is looking. For OTT experiences, AI is being used to offer personalized recommendations based on understanding how users are using the service rather than purchase history. Real-time analytics that tell broadcasters if streams are performing well can help to optimize live feeds, virtual events, or OTT experiences. Impersonation attacks on streaming platforms are growing as fraudsters look to abuse free trials. AI can pinpoint for closer human review any new accounts that appear “single use” or where unusual behavior suggests impersonation. Post-breach, AI can streamline checks on all accounts for related at-risk logins, helping drive prevention and remediation activity. AI with machine learning is being used by some platforms to spot a number of at-risk viewer signals. With the help of user-specific AI, content feeds can be tailored to the viewers’ likes and interests, driving engagement. AI can ensure stream quality is kept high even at peak demand. Such capabilities offer operational efficiency both by automating traditionally laborious tasks and by relieving human operators of the burden to constantly monitor live streaming video. AI advances in all these techniques and more are revolutionizing not just how content is delivered but also, increasingly, how to set up a future-ready streaming strategy. AI offers a way to cut costs, provide smooth audience engagement, and the right viewer-specific content at a deep level, providing capabilities that go right through the workflow on top of operations and distribution. The key to successful AI application is combining machine learning with tried and tested advanced data points and human oversight. This includes useful prediction and management of models that can identify new behaviors, which in turn drives new experiences. This is particularly useful in understanding populations to satisfy privacy concerns and where ethical business decisions need to be made. AI needs to be used in balance with the human viewpoint, including an ethical lens to offer a faceless approach where every user is treated as an individual from campaign management through to OTT deployment. In this, AI garners new views on performance and anticipated outcomes as an intermediary to identifying what should happen and highlighting when it is not performing as expected.

VR/AR Applications in Live Events

Over the past few years, the potential applications of VR/AR in different streaming have received wider interest. In live event video streaming, the vision of VR/AR is to move beyond the traditional flat-screen video stream and create new environments that can be explored rather than simply watched. Through content curation to a great extent by the audience, a storytelling script, artistic performance, music show, dance event, or streamed experimental film can turn the audience into active users, as expressions and body language are expressed in a free way, where the live training experience is the main source of creativity. VR/AR has high interactivity and audience engagement for live events in addition to accessibility features, as the interest is not in seeking engagement with the playback file. The VR/AR of live events, such as soccer, has adopted trajectory visualization in soccer games, which is a good start for future applications of different kinds of video streaming, showing the trade-offs between visualization and the metabolic demands of different complexities.

Interactive live editions of scripts or storytelling may become a new attractive feature for many direct non-live published products. A great deal of technology opens doors for stream writers, live athletes, users of web live education, and Vloggers without advanced preparation. AR world scenery streaming would need such a device, as stories of warfare could submit maps or targets. The attraction of creativity in VR/AR is unlimited as an application, although there are not many products in the market except for a few companies. It forms part of our daily lives with the evolution of technology. The audience’s view of a “live” event of interest is referred to in the narrow sense when considering VR transmission, as the audience perceives it as part of the time sequence to be recorded as an event, the poster of the experience. Live footage does not focus on physical presence or technological aspects of this model.

Potential Impact on the Industry

The increased deployments of new-age technologies – be it AI to provide statistical data on the gratitude of various shots to simulate, VR for transporting “being there” and the emotional rollercoaster of a football game, improved streaming protocols for better quality even at low bandwidths, the ability to rent out third-party VR/AR graphics, or a subscription to personally operated drone camera angles – can potentially change the way video streaming services are used and perceived. With easy access to sophisticated VR gear coming within a few years of video streaming forays, both content creators and end-point customers alike need to consider reevaluating previous assumptions. Given that the next four years are expected to bring many key leaps forward, any industry in this domain will have to present these technologies to ever more savvy and opinionated customer end-points such that they must come to expect that in every varied environment, not just that one home venue. Firstly, new technology is likely to increase the interactivity of such live content: how it’s made, what you’re made to notice, and insights into operational concerns. While the customer may be looking at more than one angle at any time – or viewing the same angle is impossible given several seen from different players – additional cameras may even capture some of the social experience. The operational cost aside, interactivity also generates advertising revenues from an audience: the official sponsors may act as an advertising manager on behalf of FSM as a percentage, as some companies also do with podcasts. Second, users might begin to expect some level of accessible inclusion, personalization, or interactivity – be it relating to hearing what other viewers have to say and when, or confirming some best practices from audiovisual computer science during replay. The evolution of traditional best practices will still likely occur over many years as the affordable technology adoption rate must be matched to the retention of users, unlike the camera angles that run out. Again, such AI and interactivity may become an additional value-added fee to draw audiences away from events in favor of 360° or other rival app-generated environments.

Best Practices for Live Streaming

It’s been nearly 30 years since the Cheddangocast was released over St. Patrick’s Day in 1993, a fun holiday stream from a small campus radio station in Miami that would, in time, lay claim to being the world’s very first live stream. Millions of events, large and small, around the world, have followed that humble little event, but few of them would adhere to anything close to a best-practices guide for live-streamed audio-video events. In this section, we’re going to dig into the best practices for this format that’s changing the game for everyone. Preparation is your best friend for a live streaming event, and that preparation and planning begins days or even weeks before the actual event is set to occur. Timing is everything, and even more important than when you stream is when you schedule that stream and when you promote it. Select the right platform for your stream to get the most eyes on it. Execution is a dual-headed process that involves the actual live stream and also real-time interaction with your viewers. If you think you’re having a problem with latency or a delay, ask or suggest to your audience that everyone refresh the page. You cannot control your viewers’ networks or their devices, but you can offer troubleshooting solutions for some of the most common problems with web streaming, such as connectivity or buffering issues. After the stream ends, your work is not quite done. There are important post-stream steps you’ll need to take to ensure you can make the most of your efforts and get more longevity out of your content. First and foremost, get feedback and make sure to track the analytics of the stream.

Planning Successful Live Events

The first and most essential step in planning a successful live event is defining the event’s purpose. Creative possibilities for your live stream are nearly endless, ranging from fairly routine, such as “lecture capture” or videoconferencing events, to more exotic options such as live coverage of a rocket launch or the Super Bowl. Yet, the best strategy is a careful focus on what you want your live event to achieve. Events typically fall into one of the following four categories, which involve increasing levels of complexity, scale, and, we hope, impact.

Regardless of how an event is characterized above, successful live events begin with an understanding of the needs and preferences of your target audience. Considerations of these needs and expectations guide the speaker or performer to a suitable level of formality or informality during a live webcast. They will also guide choices of technology, location, schedule, and much else. Use the Event Planner Checklist for planning a fairly complete list of logistical considerations related to your live event. As you get more involved in planning your event, you may also want to use the more complete Event Team Checklist.

Finally, one last “logistical” consideration of critical importance for a speaker or performer at a live event is coordinating with other participants and support team members. It is critical to strive for a shared vision of the event’s success and for a basic agreement on roles, responsibilities, and details before the event date. Failure to do so often leads to unfortunate last-minute crises that detract from the live performance. Given the above, here are some approaches to risk management and contingency planning to minimize the impact of such challenges. Consider how you might incorporate them into your planning: Have a backup plan. Whether this is a pre-recorded backup show in case the technology fails, a contingency plan to move your live event indoors in case of rain, or a list of technical support professionals on standby, you may need to turn to your backups, so it always pays to identify them in advance.

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