This week I’m going to be jumping on a train and heading up to the beautiful Lake District in the UK where I’ll be participating in the Ant Middleton 24 Hour Live Challenge.
Fortunately for everyone, and especially me, I’m not actually taking part in the challenge itself as a contender, but instead I’ll be looking after the digital side of things when it comes to broadcasting a live 24-hour event across the internet.
The event is kicking off at 4pm, 25th July, and you can watch it all go down from a few different locations including
- Facebook Live
- Twitter Live (via Periscope)
- Instagram Live
- Live streamed on the website
Live Streaming Ant Middleton 24 Hour Challenge
The live streams for the 24-hour challenge will be piped through a mixing desk up in the Lake District via two live stream cameras. The two cameras give you an opportunity to get up and personal with the action with Camera A, while Camera B can be a little bit further away from the action to take it all in a provide a quick cutaway while Camera A repositions for the next shot.
Both these feeds will go through a production mixing desk and sent through as a single feed into a Live broadcast stream. The stream produced is then hooked up against the RTMP details from each of the destinations you’re streaming to (in this case Facebook, Periscope, Website Embed, but you could also go to Vimeo, YouTube etc).
The event won’t stream live for the full 24 hours, that would be way too much downtime between action, so for each challenge we are setting up new streams and have some Pre and Post-roll poster frames to introduce and exit each as we go.
Social Voting on Ant Middleton Challenge
An hour or so before each challenge we will be pushing out social voting options for the public to decide on what twist should be added to each of the challenges. Do you make it easy on the contenders or make it even harder, the choice is put in the hands of the public.
At the end of each voting round we will tally up the votes across each social network (votes will occur on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and the overall winner will be communicated to Ant who will then broadcast the challenge live.
Setting up a Live Event Stream with Voting
A lot of work has gone into the setup of this event to make sure it all runs smoothly and the public can follow along at each stage. Once it’s all been completed I’ll post an update here to go into detail the setup from the website and social side of things to give some insight into what worked and what didn’t (hopefully more about the working side of things).