Before you begin your first live stream, there are a few settings that need to be made. In short, you’ll need a live source (streaming server) to ingest your stream, a live channel which is the destination where the stream will be published, and a live event scheduled on that channel.

Live source

A live source is the streaming server’s output that is sent to the player. You can send you encoder’s contribution feed to a streaming server and the application will send the output to the video player via a content delivery network (CDN). You can set up multiple live sources based on how many concurrent streams you anticipate, the locations from which you stream and the type of encoding you want to apply to your stream. Please see Create a Live Source for more information about setting up and configuring live sources.

Live channel

The live channel is a persistent, custom URL where your live stream will be published. If you remember television, there are channels and each channel has scheduled programs. In order to broadcast a program, you need a channel to run it on. For example, if you regularly broadcast training sessions or webinars, you would create a live channel for these events and use that same channel for each Event. Please see Create a Live Channel for more information about setting up and configuring live channels.

Live event

Continuing with the TV analogy, the live event is the program on the channel. When you schedule a live event, you first pick your channel and then you set the time and date. You can assign metadata to the Event (e.g. title, description, organization), and you can also assign a live source most appropriate for this particular live event.

There are 2 ways to create a Live Event:

1. Create a Live Event from the Schedule events page.

2. Create a Live Event from the Event templates page if you run an Event regularly.