Live Streaming Assemblies

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

I've been asked to look into live streaming of assemblies for September. My first though was to use Teams as we have it set up already and were using it for the last two weeks of term, so it is 'embedded' and familiar for Teachers. However it seems silly to live stream an event taking place into School, to 30 or 40 different classrooms in School, using a cloud based product.

 

Has anyone looked into this, I'm thinking there must be some software or product we can use to live stream across the LAN? It would need to be easy to use and set up.

 

Our broadband connection is only 100mb, and at circa 2.5mb per HD stream (according to MS) we will be using most of the available bandwidth we have if we use Teams!

 

 

Thanks

[paulellam]

I used a webcam and VLC Player to stream, some chicken eggs hatching to the school, would work for any broadcast I guess? All you need is to set up the VLC Player broadcast stream and any VLC Player client in school can view it. Another bit of software is OBS, this is normally used by dj,s for streaming into social media or online radio stations, dead simple to use etc

[SamanthaD]

Doing it internally may make things a headache - multicast streams are potentially a network crippler if not set up correctly (I don't know how to set it up correctly, but have set it up incorrectly once - never again!)

 

Some easy options are to use OBS to stream to YouTube, make the stream undiscoverable and email the link to the teachers. Lots of videos (on YouTube, strangely) on how to do this. I'm sure a few classrooms watching YouTube should be ok?

 

Either that or a Teams event might work. Same sort of thing, but you can join multiple Teams calls into a stream which is then hosted on MS Stream. Might make things a little easier on the bandwidth.

[SamanthaD]

Another thought - does it HAVE to be live? Could it not be pre-recorded and then put on a VLE to download and watch during the scheduled assembly time? That would definitely save on bandwidth, and if you've never streamed before will prevent a lot of headaches.

[smarties11]

Thanks Sam and Paul. Will look at OBS and VLC.

 

I did look at Teams live events but from September they are only available to those with A3 or A5 licenses I think. We could do Teams and tell all attendees to join with camera and mic off, so the only video being broadcast was the presenter - but then will they all remember?! Attendees would also all need to pin the presenter as otherwise they will just see a grid of empty video streams and one tiny thumbnail of the presenter.

 

I'm also leaning towards pre-recorded. It could be done easily too in PowerPoint.

[timbo343]

You could do it through GSuite (meet / youtube) if you wanted to go down this route.

 

GSuite (meet) have the ability to do live (one way) events.