You’ve got something to share with the world. Maybe you want to record in-game footage to show friends and neighbors your awesome strategy in League of Legends. Perhaps you want to run a full play-through of a game, complete with your own commentary. Maybe you’re an artist and you want people to see the organic process by which you craft your masterpieces.
Whatever the reason, you want to share something with the Internet, and YouTube simply won’t cut it.
What’s a Media Stream?
Whereas a video on YouTube is something you upload after it’s been completed, a Livestream is just that – live. Ordinarily, a stream will feature a chat room which users can log in to in order to speak to the host and comment to one another on the video, in real time. Basically, it’s like your own personal live-broadcast web station. Sounds pretty sweet, right?
How do I get started?
There’s a huge number of streaming sites you can use all across the internet. If you’ve got the money, you should look into signing up for a Producer Account on newlivestream.com. It’s a pretty big proposition,at $45/month, but you’ll get unlimited bandwidth, and an ad-free stream, so…it’s a decent trade-off. Plus…it’s actually one of the cheaper alternatives.
Otherwise, you’re going to just want to use a free site like Ustream or Own3d. Once you’ve created an account on the website of your choice, it’s time to actually set to work getting your stream set up.
Setting up your broadcast
The first thing you’re going to want to do is set up your channel. Thankfully, this is actually really straightforward. All you’ll need to do in most cases is go to your profile’s dashboard- on Ustream, the drop-down menu to access your dashboard is in the upper right hand corner.
Once you’ve got your channel created, it’s as simple as navigating to the channel, and going online. Share the link with your friends, and you’ve the beginnings of a broadcast! If you want to record a screencast, (broadcasting exactly what you see on your computer screen) you’ll need to download some additional software. Both Ustream and Livestream have a desktop application that lets you access their services without logging in to their website- each of these applications allow for screencasting, as well.
Embedding your channel
Embedding your channel into another page or website’s actually a really simple task. On the channel’s page, below the stream itself, will be an ‘embed’ button. Click it, and you’ll see the embed code. Copy and paste that code into an HTML-friendly area of your website or web-page, and you’re golden.
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