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Video: Pros and Cons of Going Direct to Multiple Platforms with Live Encoding

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Watch the complete video of this panel, LS103: Multi-Distribution of Live Video, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Jan Ozer: Going direct. Here we're talking about the ability to basically go directly from your offices to multiple services. We want to get to, say, Facebook Live and YouTube Live. Those are your two goals. What we like about going direct is you control all the streams. There's no third party involved. That's probably more important if you're in a security-conscious business like banking or government. There are no third-party fees, so there's no operating expense. You buy the software, you pay your bandwidth costs, and that's pretty much it. That's going to be slightly lower latency because there's no switching or transcoding going on at the cloud service.

What we don’t like about this is that it requires higher output bandwidth requirements. If you're going to stream to two destinations from a single source, you're going to need more bandwidth. If you're an event producer and you're going out to different locations, that can be a very significant drag, because oftentimes you don't know how much bandwidth is there.

If you're paying for bandwidth and you want to pay for two outbound streams, it's going to be very, very expensive. It's a little bit higher CAPX. With this approach I think you can do one or two streams or two or three streams, but I think it doesn't scale well beyond two or three. If you're an event producer and you want to get your video on 20 or 30 Facebook pages, you're not going to be able to go direct with hardware or software products. You're going to have to use a cloud-based service.

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