As we’ve said several times recently in published articles, television is dead, long live television. We are now living in a world where broadcasters and playout providers are having to satisfy the demands of audiences that are spread far and wide across multiple devices – the ubiquitous smart phones and tablets. Not only those of course: app-based television is here, streamed to a TV set (very) near you.
Obviously, for those steeped in broadcast television, there are challenges when it comes to streaming content. With this blog we are not talking about streaming your entire channel(s) output, automatically, to whatever streaming platform service. We are talking about precise manual control to stream programmes, news clips, sports highlights – content of that nature.
Following on from multiple conversations at NAB about how an operator, one familiar with broadcast workflows and control of broadcast equipment, could easily control a live streaming encoder, we got to work. Sadly, at this juncture we can’t reveal which live streaming encoders we’ve integrated with Helm, our flagship PC-based control software, but we will soon.
Then what happened? Well, while discussing and then demonstrating the above integration, which allows full, manual encoder control, at IBC and many times since, we received requests to solve a second issue. That issue is how to stream content to Facebook Live from a familiar operator user interface with a single button click.
We can all see the power of Facebook Live and the way it encourages live streaming to the dominant social media platform. So we listened and got to work again.
We have now integrated complete Facebook support to Helm. That means publishing to the platform with a single click while of course also controlling the live streaming encoder. You can read more here.
Our aim is to make this as easy for an operator as possible and to allow manual streaming control to be a natural extension of an existing broadcast environment. Any questions,[email protected].