My Thoughts on the Evolution of Live Streaming

Why does Live Streaming excite you?

The pandemic created a need to feel more connected through the digital world. Being able to listen and communicate directly has become more essential. If once it was only online influencers and creators who utilized live streaming, now every business needs to build that online presence effectively. Recent advancements in live streaming software have made it easier for entrepreneurs and small business owners to produce live content more consistently. Livestreaming is no longer reserved exclusively for major events or TV production studios.

What are the trends in this area or products in this area that you are the fondest of? Why?

There are many new live streaming software nowadays. Some of them are expensive, while others are free. Some live streaming software work better for some industries than others. But here are some of the most advanced live streaming options for creators.

Evmux:

evmux was initially established in 2011 as Xtag to deliver beautiful, profitable in-person events anywhere in the world.

Then following the Covid pandemic, Xtag pivoted, and in 2021, evmux was born and unleashed its easy-to-use Live Editors platform that enables creators of any kind to edit every aspect of their show, podcast, webinar, or virtual event before the stream seamlessly or even while it's live! evmux allows creators (from a one-person show to a full production team) to record and download their fully branded content and split each participant's audio/video downloads for seamless post-production editing.

So far, evmux has worked with large clients, including Facebook, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and more.

StreamYard:

“StreamYard is a live streaming studio in your browser. Interview guests, share your screen, and much more. Stream directly to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other platforms. StreamYard makes it easy to broadcast your live show to all audiences on multiple platforms at once. Interview guests, sync comments, and brand every broadcast.” - Via: https://streamyard.com/

OBS:

Via Wikipedia: “OBS Studio is a free and open-source app for screencasting and live Streaming. Written in C/C++ and built with Qt, OBS Studio provides real-time capture, scene composition, recording, encoding, and broadcasting via the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).

It can stream videos to any RTMP-supporting destination, including YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Facebook.

For video encoding, OBS Studio can use the x264 transcoder, Intel Quick Sync Video, Nvidia NVENC and the AMD Video Coding Engine to encode video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or H.265/HEVC formats. It can encode multiple tracks of audio in the AAC format. More experienced users can choose any codecs and containers available in libavcodec and libavformat, or output the stream to a custom FFmpeg URL.”

OBS Studio also supports plug-ins to extend its functionality.

What are the positive impacts they can have on society?

It seems as the natural evolution of the podcast format is to make it more engaging to the audience. Live recordings are much more interactive for the viewers and listeners who feel like they are part of the conversation and not just by listeners.

We see this type of mindset on social platforms like Tik Tok where consumption is balanced with creation or platforms like Twitter spaces that resemble an interactive show and tell meeting.

What are your predictions on how these technologies will evolve?

More and more brands are going to adopt live streaming as an essential part of their marketing activities. Maybe even have someone in-house dedicated especially to this activity.