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Live Streaming
My Live Streaming Journey
By Michael Forrest
I moved from London to a studio flat in Berlin in 2014, with only a handful of Facebook connections in the city to draw on for company. I spent a lot of time alone. At some point I ran out of TV shows to watch, and that’s when I discovered Twitch.
Twitch in 2014
Twitch in 2014 was the Wild West - everything felt like uncharted territory. I saw people playing games, but they were using a Green Screen, and they had all these overlays and you’d see $20 donations coming in at random. There was no Content ID so they could play any music they wanted.
I followed this one middle-aged guy who would go live in his messy spare room, crank up Timber by Pitbull and then dance and yell into a headset mic while donations streamed in. I think he worked on an oil rig.
I’d gone to Berlin to get live music gigs, to play as regularly as possible in a place where people might actually have time to come and see me (unlike in London where everybody’s in a hurry to get home after work, or in the pub until closing time). I wanted to try streaming but I didn’t want to play games, so I tried playing live music instead.
Those first live music streams felt like real gigs. I felt the same adrenaline. But I didn’t have to pack up my gear and wire everything up again every time, I could just go live. And unlike a live show on a stage, I could talk back and forth with the audience throughout, something that was never possible before.
My first streams looked awful. I had a good audio interface and I knew how to set up the sound, but visually it was bad.
I tried some stuff with background visuals (realtime).
#15 - I got a backdrop with bricks on it and things started looking okay
I played two hours every night and after a while I started looking pretty good.
That’s when I built Shoot () because I couldn’t find a clean camera feed app in the App Store.
An early version of Shoot allowed me to do this.
I have a video on my YouTube channel showing how I set up OBS with multiple camera views using Shoot and a DSLR or GoPro, to make engaging live music streams.
Video Podcasting in 2018
The next big chapter was when I was back in London. When we started we’d record for a couple of hours every week and then I’d spend the best part of a day editing. After a hundred or so episodes we had both developed a lot of confidence on mic so I pushed to change it to a live stream, in an effort to get my Mondays back.
I wanted the live version to feel similar to the edited version, which meant setting up a title sequence, music breaks and an outtro. I did this all in OBS and it was a headache. I have a video showing how on my YouTube.
Covid
In March of 2020 two things happened. First, a global pandemic. Second, app sales.
Shoot, my little camera app that had taken me an afternoon to build, was making hundreds of pounds a day.
I didn’t know how long this would last, or why it was happening, or who was using it, but over the next few months I started to figure it out.
I’d initially assumed it was mostly musicians like myself, who had come in via my YouTube video.
But after talking to users, I found that there were many different kinds of people who wanted to upgrade their webcam, augment their remote video, create content for YouTube or look better in Zoom calls. I spoke to school teachers, online business owners, magicians and drag queens. A lot of people had to figure out remote video at the same time, and I had a head start. (Did I mention when I was in Berlin I was doing remote work for companies based in London, Hong Kong and San Francisco?).
Squares TV
I created to start figuring this all out, posting what I’d learned, recording interviews with different types of streamers and content creators. Throughout this time I was trying out new website tools and app ideas. I was learning from lots of different people and was uniquely placed to solve their problems.
Beat Sheet
I was talking to a realtor who did regular conference calls who wanted to plan a run-of-show and run through his Ecamm Live scenes automatically, instead of having to drive the show like a space ship with a Stream Deck. I was familiar with this problem from my own podcasting experience.
I’d also been kicking around ideas to “linearise” an otherwise complex grid of performance options with music app projects like “LineUp” from 2014.
Beat Sheet took a few days to build but, for a certain audience, gained some popularity.
Video Pencil
With Shoot, my goal had always been to keep the video implementation as simple as possible - the first versions just mirrored the webcam onto the phone screen and let you mirror it over USB or AirPlay. There was no user interface, just a few gestures that you could look up using the App Store screenshots. I only added the gestures because people started asking for pesky new features like being able to switch to a different camera or lock the white balance. Over time it got enough features to warrant on screen buttons - that was version 2.0. That’s when I added a telestrator feature (I didn’t know the word telestrator at the time). I still wanted to keep things as simple as possible, but one day somebody asked me a question that has gripped my attention ever since:
“Can you make it so that I can draw on a camera feed from a different device?”
That’s when I really had to dive into the innards of Apple’s audio visual and networking frameworks. I created first using NDI, before implementing my own networked video and remote control stack with a companion Mac app.
CueCam Presenter
grew from a combination of Video Pencil and Beat Sheet. I wanted a simple way in to do all the stuff that my apps let you do.
It’s got the teleprompter and remote control sequencing features of Beat Sheet, but it seamlessly connects to Video Pencil and Shoot to give you a virtual webcam you can use anywhere.
You can control other apps or record video directly.
Last week, I added a feature I’ve wanted for a very long time: Live Streaming. Everything has come full circle.
One of my biggest problems in the early days of live streaming was the shear number of apps I had to run in order to go live.
I had OBS for my live stream and scenes. I used AirServer which exposed a Syphon feed from my iPhone, which I could bring into OBS. I had a Blackmagic interface to connect my DSLR and ran another program called “Black Syphon” to bring that into OBS. I had Audio Hijack to mix my audio interface, set up my monitoring, and a virtual mic to bring it into OBS. When I was doing more elaborate live music streams, I’d have an OBS plugin installed, special firmware on my Canon camera and windows sitting open with green backgrounds for my Twitch overlays to bring them back into OBS. The go live checklist was overwhelming, and I have gone live more than once with no audio for the first 20 minutes (when, if I was lucky, some kind soul would let me know).
Now, finally, I can do everything I want with just one app. No more audio loopback, no more Syphon utilities, audio monitoring that makes sense and warns me if things aren’t quite right. A tool that lets me plan out a live stream and use my teleprompter, making it actually more fun to be prepared than to just turn up and figure things out on stream. I can make my videos and go live without having to touch any OBS or Ecamm Live configuration. I just think about my content.
I’ve learned a lot over the last ten years of live streaming, and after watching Alex Lindsay and the Office Hours panel fielding questions about AV production, I’m confident that I’ve brought in the best practices available, not just from Twitch and YouTube, but from professional productions too. Except with CueCam, you don’t need a crew, just yourself, your Mac, and maybe your iPhone and iPad.
To see how CueCam handles live streaming, here’s a quick guide.
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