Last Friday, Team Veda streamed our first episode of a brand new bi-weekly YouTube Live Stream called CiviCRM.Tea{with}Veda ☕ - CiviCRM.TV for short!
Every other Friday, we will choose a different CiviCRM topic to discuss, build and demo live on air to help you on your own CiviCRM journey. It's an informal, interactive session with something for all CiviCRM skill levels including end-users, administrators and developers.
Bar a few initial technical difficulties, we successfully streatmed EP01 'Installing CiviCRM in WordPress' last Friday. We’ve previously hosted webinars and online meetups but this was our first time ever doing a YouTube Live Stream and we thought it would be useful to share some lessons learned from the experience.
We used Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to stream directly to YouTube and control the scenes. It’s an incredibly powerful piece of open source software that can be used to control your stream scenes, layout, thumbnails, video and audio sources, integrate chat windows etc and we’d highly recommend it.
What did I learn from presenting our first episode?
- STREAM KEYS: Ensure you have the correct stream key from your YouTube Live Stream. We scheduled the episode on YouTube first, took the stream key and added it to OBS. It appears there are some inconsistencies with OBS if you don’t consistently stick to either the new YouTube stream interface or the classic. Get your stream keys with ample time before you go-live.
- MULTITASKING: I worked from two screens. One was my main screen sharing monitor with the browser, terminal etc to be shown on the stream. The other with my episode notes and OBS. It’s easy to miss the incoming YouTube Live chat and interaction from viewers, a third monitor/tablet of some kind would solve the need to keep alt-tabbing and breaking the flow.
- NOTIFICATIONS: Turn incoming notifications off. I usually use Muzzleapp to block notifications when screen sharing. It was buggy with OBS and live streaming and we had a few instances of internal IM chat pop up on screen.
- FEEDBACK: I’m sure I’m not the first to acknowledge that presenting to a virtual audience can be challenging! In face to face presentations you can see faces, reactions, engagement and read the room to adjust accordingly. Presenting to an invisible audience where the only feedback loop available is the live chat box can initially feel disconcerting. Keep calm, keep checking in for questions and carry on!
How can you watch?
Go to the official Veda Consulting Company YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE and CLICK THE BELL 🔔 icon to be notified when we go live. The next episode will be on the Friday 24th of July at 2PM BST and will continue bi-weekly after.
If you miss a CiviCRM.TV episode, don't worry, it will be available to watch on our YouTube channel after the broadcast has ended.
Have an idea for an episode?
Is there an area of CiviCRM you'd like to learn about? Some specific functionality or an extension you'd like us to deploy and configure live on-air?
If you have an idea for a Tea{with}Veda episode, we'd love to hear it! Please post your suggestion to our ideas hub, ideas.civicrm.tv and/or upvote an existing suggestion for a topic you'd most like to see us talk about!
Look forward to seeing you at our future episodes!
Parvez
hello@vedaconsulting.co.uk
