How to Integrate Real-Time Social Media with Streaming Video

Enter vMix Social

Streaming Media readers might recognize vMix as the company that debuted its video mixing and webcasting software at NAB 2013 and was recognized by the editors of Streaming Media with the 2013 Streaming Media Best of NAB award. Since then, vMix has launched vMix Social, a plugin that integrates Twitter, Facebook, and IRC social media content directly into the title generator in their vMix software.

vMix Social can pull tweets and Facebook comments that you can send to vMix as titles. Click the image to see it at full size.

The vMix workflow is easy to understand and operate and can replace entirely or work with most existing live video switching and webcasting workflows. The vMix software can be used to mix multiple camera inputs, play back local video, mix in a remote video feed, and switch to PowerPoint slides. The program output can be streamed and recorded as well, all assuming you have the right computer components and enough power. But you don’t need to use vMix for the entire workflow in order to take advantage of the vMix Social plugin and start integrating real-time social media in a live stream.

vMix can be used for the entire switch/stream/record workflow, but if you’re working with a legacy workflow that revolves around a hardware switcher and/or webcast encoder, you only need to feed vMix your video switcher program output, then add the social media title components using the vMix Social add-on and vMix software, and then feed your vMix output to your webcast encoder.

The computer you’re running vMix on would need to be able to accept a feed from your video switcher and output a feed that your webcast encoder can accept. Common connection options include Thunderbolt or USB3.0 for uncompressed video streams or more traditional broadcast HD-SDI and consumer HDMI connections, but exactly which connections you will need to use or upgrade to will vary depending on your workflow and hardware.

vMix Social can pull 100 Tweets from a user timeline, user home feed, user favorites, and search, which is useful for pulling Tweets with hashtags.

vMix Social can be set up to pull Twitter feeds from a user’s tweets, their home timeline, a search, or their Favorites. The search option is useful when working with an event hashtag. Similarly you can pull comments from recent Facebook Page comments. Both Twitter and Facebook options can be set up to feed just the text or photos as well.

vMix Social can pull comments from posts on Facebook Pages.

In my testing, I did find the vMix Social indicators next to the Twitter and Facebook icon to be counter-intuitive. Instead of displaying a green box and the word “On” when you turn on a feed, it displays a green box and the word “Off.” A number count displays the number of comments or tweets that have been pulled from each social media network to a maximum of 100.

When you see Green and Off, thyat actually means the Twitter and Facebook feeds are On.

Once you get past the reverse labeling on the “On” button, you can open a web interface that shows the entire feed of tweets and comments that are available to send or queue to the vMix titler. Clicking on a tweet or comment opens the interaction in a window and offers a send, add to queue, or cancel button. Clicking Send pushes the interaction live to the webcast feed while Add to Queue intuitively adds it to the queue.

Pushing a tweet or comment live or adding it to the rotation is easy with vMix Social.

Before you can push interactions to your live feed, you need to add a special social media title template as an input in the vMix software. There are several templates that you can choose from, all of them customizable in terms of what and how much information gets displayed and where. Once you add a title as an input, it becomes visible and available in the vMix Social add-on in the Title drop-down menu. The title needs to be assigned to an overlay and there are options to automatically update the title with the most recent entries, for duration, number of interactions in the rotation, queued entries only, and to limit the number of characters. Selecting Refresh Title pushes the title live or you can also control this from the vMix console by toggling the corresponding overlay number shortcut on or off.

Choosing a Social Media Title template in vMix from the available presets

Viewers interacting with a second screen while consuming content is not something that we, as producers, have much control over, but by integrating real-time social media with streaming video we can try to maintain viewer engagement and encourage them to use their second screens to interact with the content producers and other viewers, instead of with their wider social media network.