How KKFI Live-Streamed Video for the Folk Alliance Conference

Social and new media pivots around simple concepts -- such as "try out new tools, even at the risk of failing." For KKFI 90.1 FM community radio, which devotes so much energy to creating traditional broadcast media, all produced by volunteer programmers, there's no time for testing the waters of media innovation. But try is what they've done recently -- and not once, but twice.

KKFI recently purchased equipment to broadcast live audio events from a remote site, and tried it out at the 2014 Folk Alliance International conference held in Kansas City, Missouri, February 19-22, 2014. With the help of videographer Rick Groom the station also live video-streamed seven hours of music performances. I am going to tell you about how the station video-streamed the performances.

The radio station had several options to live stream the video, but chose YouTube Live Events as the outlet. The choice made sense because KKFI already had a YouTube Channel with 39 videos, 12,000 views and 44 subscribers -- a small start.

Click on image for full-size image
YouTube started rolling out their "live event" option within the last 2 years, and for most YouTube channels in good standing, it's just simply enabling live events, which is what I did for KKFI's channel about two weeks before the music conference.

To prepare the KKFI YouTube channel for live events I enabled this setting. Two weeks before the scheduled event Rick tested a live video event, selecting the best video and audio settings, as well as the "ingestion settings" for the event. He acquired a Monarch Matrox video encoder, which easily worked with YouTube Live.


Since KKFI was going to broadcast from two nights at the conference, we created two live events on the YouTube Channel, inserting a title slide to brand the event. We promoted the events on the KKFI web page and with on-air radio spots.

Once the video camera was set up and connected to the encoder, then it's a matter of starting the stream from the YouTube Channel. To engage video audience members I commented during the event.

We saw a maximum of 20 people concurrently watching the live event during the first of two nights at the conference. With over 200 views of the video this represents a moderate success to the live streaming event.

Statistics from YouTube for the February 19, 2014 event.



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