What is an Event Template?
The Live Event is a final preparation before going live. Event Template is a form to plan the details like when and where you are going to stream.
Why do I need an Event Template?
An event template is optional although it sets up the program on the channel you're streaming to. Without scheduling the live event through a template, you’ll have to configure each Live Event start manually. The scheduling process, however, is mandatory even for ad-hoc streams (i.e., unplanned events) to ensure that the channel is correctly configured to broadcast your stream.
How do I Create a Live Event Template?
1. Tell your viewers about your live event
Title. The Public Portal will display this header for the Event.
Description. This field is optional. Yet a good description helps guide your viewers and engages them before the events start. The text field accepts markup so we recommend spending time on the description to make your event attractive to viewers. It is indexed for search, so a good description also helps viewers find your event.
You can style your description using markup and emojis. Please see this article for more information: AI generated descriptions.
Organization. This selection is optional. The organization list is managed in the Metadata section of the admin portal. If your organization is not found in the list, go to Metadata > Metadata fields and find the metadata field called Organization. Open this and add your organization to the list of prepopulated values.
2. What are you streaming and where you will publish it
Channel. This is where the live stream will be published. The live event will inherit the channel’s privacy setting (public or unlisted).
Live source. This is the source of the live stream for the player. You can stream from Ravnur Media Services (RMS) or from another source that produces a .m3u8 playlist URL (this is called a generic source). The live source will be prepopulated based on the channel you select, but you can override this channel and select a different live source.
You can’t double-book a live source. If it is already scheduled to run an event at your selected time, you can’t schedule your event on it.
Schedule your live event
While in the template creator, you do not need to specify the start time. You’ll add it when you create a live event from the template when you are about to Create live event to Start a live stream.
Time zone. This will default to your local machine’s time zone. You can change it if necessary.
Duration. This is the expected duration of your live stream. It is used for scheduling and reserves the channel and live source for this amount of time beginning at the start time of your event.
Duration does not automatically stop your event. If your event runs longer, no need to worry.
Uploads
Channel player splash image. You can upload a thumbnail that will be displayed as the splash image in the player, as the thumbnail in the channel guide, and also as the VOD thumbnail if the stream is recorded.
Agenda. If your event has an agenda, you can upload it here. It will be displayed on the channel live event page for your viewers. The file should be a pdf and the max size is 25MB.
Automatically start streaming
This is an optional section that gives you the ability to start the preview and/or go live automatically at a preset time before the scheduled start of the live stream. This is useful when your encoder is already pushing the contribution feed to the ingest URL. Learn more.
Start preview before scheduled event start time. This will start the Azure Media Services streaming server and create the streaming URL for the preview player in the control room. The preview streaming URL is a different URL than the live streaming URL.
Go live before scheduled event start time. You can set the offset up to 60 minutes before the scheduled start of the live stream. When this time is reached, the player will receive the live streaming URL and your viewers will be watching your live stream.
Your template is completed. It will always be present in the “Event templates” for you to quickly go live from the configured settings.
Post production settings
These settings affect what happens to the live stream after it’s finished.
These settings will appear if your selected source has the “RMS” type. Learn more.
Enable viewing of recorded events immediately. The recorded live stream will be published immediately after the live stream is over, and it will be viewable as a VOD. Before the encoding is complete, the video will be streamed from the live archive (used for the DVR functionality) and when encoding of the live archive is complete, the stream will be using the MP4 versions. The video will have an "available" status immediately and will be accessible to users on the portals even during the processing phase.
Do not convert to VOD after stream completion. This option will not prevent the creation of VOD, as VOD is always created after stream completion. However, selecting this option will disable the creation of previews, thumbnails, and closed captions. For Standard Passthrough encoding, it will trigger transcoding into various qualities if not selected. For 720p- or 1080p-encoded streams, multiple quality versions are already pre-encoded and available immediately. If you do not need previews, thumbnails, and closed captions for non-Standard Passthrough VOD, disable this field to skip unnecessary transcoding.
Generate captions for the VOD asset. Selecting this will add automatic caption generation for the VOD to the processing pipeline. When you select this option, you need to select the language of the audio track.