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Stephanie Liu: She's doing it. All right. And the countdown is on. Hey, everyone! What's up, what's up, what's up! And welcome to another episode of Lights, Camera, Live. We're about to get started. If you're just tuning in, go ahead and leave a comment and let me know where you're watching from you guys. We have a very, very fun show today. Let me tell you who I have on the show today. We have Ian Anderson Gray. And yes, I do have a perfectly titled bio for him, but I will tell you this. He is my go-to for everything OBS studio, which you guys know is this whole entire set up here. So if you are a PC user, by all means this is the man that you should be talking to. So as we get started, if you are here, again, go ahead and leave a comment. Tell us where you're watching from. I'm here in San Diego. Ian, tell everyone where you're at!
Ian A. Gray: Well, I live in Manchester, just south of Manchester in the U.K. So it's a little bit later than you, it's just after 10:00 p.m. here.
Stephanie Liu: Very, very fun! Okay and then hey, look we have Eddie Garrison here. Eddie, it's so great to see you! He's tuning in from Orlando, so it's nice to have another person on the show with us today. So the bots just went out, so people will be joining in and Ian and I were just kind of joking about that. How long have you been live streaming now, Ian?
Ian A. Gray: Oh well it depends what you count as live streaming. When I was doing you know... I was doing it on Google Plus before you know Google Hangouts, but Facebook Live since early last year.
Stephanie Liu: Early last year. And do you still get the nerves?
Ian A. Gray: Oh yeah, we were talking about this weren't we. So yeah, absolutely. I think if you don't feel the fear in live you probably should stop it you know. But there's got to be some... I think there's adrenaline. You know, my background, as I may have mentioned to you before, is music. I trained as a professional singer, so the best gigs, the best concerts that I did were when I was really nervous and then I was able to channel the energy into the performance. And there was one concert when I was so nervous and it was the best performance I ever gave. A week after, I was for some reason I was really ambivalent, no energy and it was the worst performance. So, I don't know how you feel about this you know, having done so many shows now, whether you feel less nervous now, I think maybe I feel slightly less nervous and I know what to expect maybe a bit more and I've got things technically in place, but there's still nerves and there's still that nervous energy I think.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah I mean I would say... So, actually the 27th is going to be my one year anniversary of launching Lights, Camera, Live. I'll say that I think now that the show has actually grown and there's more eyeballs on it, it does make me a little bit more nervous because before when no one knew who you were it's like oh you can mess up and make those mistakes. But now that people know you it's like oh goodness, goodness gracious. OK. All right. So I am just going to go ahead and check to see who is in the show. There's 11 of you, go ahead and leave a comment, say hi! Ian is all the way from Manchester, he's trying to stay energized while the kids are sleeping.
Ian A. Gray: I am full of energy, it's fine. I can do this, I can do this!
Stephanie Liu: You're awesome. So for those of you who are just joining, Ian Anderson Gray he is the founder of Seriously Social and he pretty much knows everything in terms of all of the shortcuts when it comes to social media, the tools and tech that you need to really step up and amp up your game. Now Ian has actually... You've been speaking all over the world haven't you?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah pretty much, yeah. It's San Diego, I was speaking at Social Media Marketing World. I was in Poland earlier this year. Ireland, London. All those kinds of places, so yeah really love doing it.
Stephanie Liu: Very, very cool. OK, great. Let's see here... says Sandra, "Hey!" So nice to see you. Savannah, so great to see you as well. So let's talk a little bit about Facebook Live and where it is today. Because I feel like when it first started we were all kind of curious is this really going to work, is it not going to work, and now one in every five videos on Facebook is a live broadcast. That's insane to me.
Ian A. Gray: It's completely nuts. You know and I think some of us who were early adopters last year, and actually, to be fair, I think even if you get into live video now you're still an early adopter. But you know I think we kind of knew this was going to be big because Facebook were making such a big thing about it. They were investing everything into it because obviously there was Meerkat, Periscope all these other platforms and Facebook, being the big boy, was coming in and was putting everything into it. So yeah it's been really interesting to see what's happened in a way, I think we were talking about this, it's like it's still in I would say beta ["beeta"], you'd probably say beta or whatever it is. I always get confused. But yeah, it's still kind of quirky even now but it's less so. So I think it's definitely... If you haven't adopted, if you haven't looked into doing Facebook Live I think now is a really good time because there's a lot of the quirks, a lot of the things that didn't go quite so well last year are a lot easier and a lot better now.
Stephanie Liu: That's very true and I do agree with you, there are still some quirks. Sometimes there's some technical difficulties and things like that. But as you and I were both joking, as a live streamer you automatically become an improv actor. So if something goes wrong you just gotta roll with it. And I think the most surprising thing would be actually if a live stream actually went well without any hiccups whatsoever. I especially say that for Samantha Salmon who is one of my students, who is just like "Something went wrong!" and I was like "You know, you just got to keep going with it, you just got to keep going with it."
Ian A. Gray: It's so true. And I think sometimes when you're doing the live broadcast and something minor happens, to you it's like the biggest thing ever. Everyone's going to notice! And actually most people won't notice. And okay, if it is big, so on my live show I co-host it with a friend of mine Julia Bramble, her cat jumped onto the table and her webcam fell over. And it was like "AHHH," but it was hilarious. And it just kind of brought up a bit of humanity to it. And that's one of the great things about live is the fact that things can go wrong and do go wrong. I think that's one of the attractions with it. So I think those of us who are doing live broadcasts you know I think we can get a bit stressed and anxious about things going wrong, but they will go wrong and in a way we just have to smile and laugh and get on with it.
Stephanie Liu: That's very true. So, what would be your tips for anyone that's just starting out now? They're like "I want to go live, but I'm still just trying to get over the fear that stuff is going to go wrong." How would you try to walk them through that?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah that's a good question. So the first thing is, if you feel afraid of doing it that is only natural. We all do. I still feel nervous. We've been talking about that, so don't don't let that put you off. There's got to be some kind of fear. But the first thing is, keep it simple. There's the fear, but there's also this fear of the gear and the tools, and all this kind of stuff. Obviously what you're doing here Stephanie is you've got amazing kind of technical stuff going on, all these tools and stuff going on. But it's not a good place to start there. Start off with one of these, with a smartphone. And just start broadcasting on your smartphone. But the first thing that you can do is if you're going to broadcast, I would recommend broadcast to your Facebook profile and then change the privacy settings to only me so the only person that's going... Nobody's going to be watching it because you're only sharing that with yourself. And then afterwards you can then go back and watch the replay. If you're anything like me you will hate watching yourself because we're not used to seeing ourselves and we'll probably say, "Oh I don't speak like that" or whatever, but try and be really constructive with your feed, with looking at it, and do that a few more times. Then after that, go live to your friends and just do that to begin with. And once you then feel comfortable, then go public. But the best thing to do when you get to that stage is to have a strategy, to have a plan, know where you're going to talk about it. So maybe have three points and go through those points and you will be amazed at actually how you get on with it. It won't be quite as nerve racking as you think it will be.
Stephanie Liu: I love that you mentioned to just focus on three points because, as you mentioned, when you go live the nerves do... They hit you, right? And so if you're thinking "Alright, cool I'm gonna have like 10 points, 10 stats I'm going to cover" that's not going to happen. It's just going to get a hold of you and if you could just you know... One tip that I usually have, let me take a look. I usually have a post-it note and I'll stick it right by my webcam so that it feels like I'm still looking at you and I'm not actually looking down all the time trying to see what my notes are. So that's that's another tip for the rest of the Lights, Camera, Live crew that's here. Ian, so great to see you! Bo is here too. Everyone's just popping in. So Ian, we've talked a little bit about start off with your smartphone, get used to it, get comfortable with it get used to seeing yourself, hearing your voice. I could tell you personally that took me a while to get over and I was like "Oh my goodness." But aren't there certain mics that make your voice sound a little bit more rich and deeper? What kind do you use right now?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah. Well I wouldn't necessarily recommend the one I'm using now. At some point I will move, I will change, but I'm using the the blue Yeti microphone which is a USB microphone. I've been using this for about three or four years. It's worked really really well for me. I think what the really important thing with these kind of microphones is that you have a pop shield. And actually I should probably get a little bit closer to this, but it's difficult when you're on a live broadcast because if I do this you can't see my face. Stephanie Liu: And that's right, because if I do that too and it's just like oh mic and it's weird.
Ian A. Gray: Yeah, so you've got a blue Yeti. How do you feel about that? Are you happy?
Stephanie Liu: You know, it's interesting because I feel like before it used to work out so well, but I've noticed that when I've been doing interviews on other people's shows, like for Tyler Anderson's show, the audio came out a little weird and I don't know if it was because he brought me on via Zoom. It just sounded kind of funky. I was like " That's now how I sound like."
Ian A. Gray: Well, Zoom is really good quality. I use Skype on Zoom, but I tend to use Zoom more. But yeah, I don't know. It's a good microphone, it's reasonably priced, it's like a $100 or $110, that kind of thing. So I think that works well. The other thing that I'm possibly thinking about, I'm going to be re-doing my office and getting a bit more of a studio set up, so we're going to get some lights and a back drop. But I'm thinking of getting a lapel mic actually. So I've got a lapel mic for my iPhone it's just a Lavalier Rode... What's it called? Road Plus Lava.. I forgot what it's called now, but I think it's Lavalier Plus, that's the one. And that works really well and so you could use something like that because obviously when you're live, video is the important thing, so you don't want this massive microphone in the way. Like I have!
Stephanie Liu: Like what we both have! Seriously you guys if you take a look at it, it's pretty much like the size of my fist. I might as well just be like, "Hey, how are you?" Ian, I actually used to do the lapel mic and this is just for the female live streamers. It felt really weird because it would pull down my shirt a little bit which is not OK. And then it was also because I talk a lot with my hands and I felt like I just kept hitting it. So it was just weird. It was odd.
Ian A. Gray: You probably just need to test these things out. I'm not an expert on microphones, but I think these USB microphones like the blue Yeti are probably perfectly fine for most people. Try the lapel mic. There are other types of mics as well that you could look into. But if you think of using a smartphone a lapel mic is probably fine, so just get the Rode one it's inexpensive and that will take things to the next level. So if you own a smartphone you can get... A good lighting is important, a good microphone is important as well. And also the other thing that is absolutely vital is upload speed, your internet needs to be really really good.
Stephanie Liu: Yes. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I've actually had guests that had 1 Mbps upload speed. OK. Go!
Ian A. Gray: Yeah this is the tricky one you know because all these, your Internet service providers they make a big song and dance about 100 Mbps. And you know what, it doesn't really matter about the upload speed. So it doesn't matter so much about the download speeds, it's the upload speed. So for you, you are uploading from your computer to Facebook Live and so you need to have a decent upload speed and quite often the upload speeds are lower, quite a bit lower than the download speeds. So I would say really as a bare minimum you should be looking at 5 Mbps if it's all possible. I do know people that have coped with lower, 3 Mbps is probably the real basic low. You're going to struggle underneath that. And then ideally if you've got 10. So I've got about 11-12 Mbps and the good thing about that is if you want to get into the more advanced stuff such as multi-streaming, multi-casting to the likes of say YouTube, Periscope, and Facebook all at the same time you're starting to be able to do that. So that's always a good thing. Stephanie Liu: Yeah yeah. And so where do you go to actually check out your internet speed? Where would the best spot be?
Ian A. Gray: So I use speedtest.net. There's loads of these, so I actually... You can download... They've got free apps for PCs and Macs. I download the app, so I just quickly before every time I go live I just do a quick speed test. So I did that actually just before this because obviously I'm not broadcasting live, but I'm still uploading my video in a sense. So it was important that I've a decent upload. So yeah, speedtest.net, download the apps for both PC and Mac. And that's definitely something to try.
Stephanie Liu: You know what's really interesting is I feel like everyone is jumping to BeLive.TV because it's an easy platform to get started and it's very turn-key. And so I had to ask them, what's the ideal internet upload speed? And they said as long as you have 1 Mbps you should be good. And I was like "Whaaat?" I don't know.
Ian A. Gray: Well I think the quality is not going to be good, it's not going to be great at 1 Mbps. But I think what BeLive.TV does is because it's done through the web, through your browser, it compresses it quite a bit. So it's able probably to cope with 1 Mbps. I've never tried it, so I don't know. But some parts of the world you know, I've got some friends in Australia and in some parts of Australia the upload speed is really bad and so if you're desperate to do Facebook Live, then maybe BeLive.TV is going to be the only tool for you. Because if you're using the likes of OBS Studio or Webcaster or something else then you're going to struggle. And BeLive.TV is a great platform. I think you're just going to look at all the different platforms and work out what's going to be best for you.
Stephanie Liu: That's very true. So, Angela just asked a question and she wanted us to repeat what the tool or the app was to test your internet speed and it's speedtest.net. Okay, great. So, we talked about you could go live on your mobile phone ,you could use something like BeLive, but you could even go live through your Chrome browser. Do you have any tips for that?
Ian A. Gray: Yes. So you mean search directly through Facebook? So yeah if you go live, you could go live to your... It's not rolled out to everybody, it's weird. On one of my pages I've got it, and on another page I don't have it. So it's kind of weird, it's still kind of rolling out. But yeah, you need to have a reasonable upload speed and get a decent web... One thing we haven't talked about is... we've talked about the microphones, but we haven't really talked about webcams.
Stephanie Liu: Oh, that's right! Yeah. Let's talk about that.
Ian A. Gray: So, webcams... If your computer has got an integrated, if you've got a laptop with an integrated webcam you'll probably be OK. But I highly recommend buying a webcam. They're not expensive and the one that most people seem to be using is the Logitech C920. It's very reasonably priced, it's what I'm using at the moment. And you can even, if you want to get really geeky, you can even buy two or three and you could like have different camera angles and all of that kind of stuff, which is... So I've got two, again I'm in the middle of setting up my studio so I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to use this. But you know, you can definitely... Something like Logitech C920 is a great one to use. So yeah, do that but make sure you've got good upload speed, microphone, webcam, and that is probably the next stage. So once you've broadcasted form your mobile device, then maybe try it from Facebook directly. And it's kind of like a quick way of going live, it's not got any of the super fancy stuff but it's up to you. And at the moment, the other thing is you wouldn't be able to do what we're doing at the moment. You wouldn't be able to bring in a guest this way.
Stephanie Liu: Very true, very true.
Ian A. Gray: Whereas you can, if it's been rolled out to you, you can do that on a mobile device. But it's a little bit...
Stephanie Liu: Only on an iOS, right?
Ian A. Gray: Well it's weird you know. This is really funny. So as I said to you before the show started, I've been a Windows user for 20 years. And then I bought my first Mac last year. But about three or four months ago I got so frustrated with all my friends that were saying they had this split screen, they were bringing in guests and I was like "Oh, this is happening!" Because last year, this happened to me before, this was one of the reasons why I got into OBS Studio and Facebook Live. Because I didn't have it on my Android phone and everyone else seemed to have it. So I looked up the way of broadcasting from desktop. So I thought you know, I've had enough. So I literally drove to my nearest Apple store and I bought an iPhone. And this is me who like last year, I was like... I have to admit, I'm sorry people, but I was really against the Apple and now I've got a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.
Stephanie Liu: See what live streaming does to you? I feel like that's one of the things that people also... Like if you want to get started with live streaming just know that if you're not serious about it just yet, just start off with your smartphone and a lavalier mic. And then as you start to build your audience and as you start to build your confidence and you're like "OK cool I think this is going to be a thing," then start investing in the gear, right? Probably not go all out spending.
Ian A. Gray: Yeah I think that's important. So it kind of depends. I know the likes of Michael Hyatt for example. I think he kind of like knew, "This is what I want to do." And so he went all out and he went for the light, the best kind of mega studio. But for a lot of us I think we've got to kind of get used to the whole technical side of things, we've got to get our message out there, we've got to try it over time. And so this is what I've been doing. I've been kind of building things slowly so the next thing for me as I said is lights, probably a better camera, and a backdrop and all this kind of thing. But don't let the technical side in the gate get in the way of actually why we are doing these live broadcasts. And ultimately it's about putting ourselves in front of the audience, making ourselves more accessible, showing our human side, and communicating our message to people. So that's the most important thing. If they're good in the technical side of things, that enhances that. Great! Let's be frank, Stephanie. I know that we really quite like messing around with [inaudible] It's absolutely fine, isn't it?
Stephanie Liu: Yeah I would probably say like, again this is coming from a female perspective. I feel like for me my big investment was "I need to get the light" because I was just like the ring light is just going to cover all the imperfections. I'm a mom of a 2-year-old and so I don't always get like the best sleep. And so I figured the best lighting is going to help me out a whole ton. And so the lighting that I honestly have is just the ring light. And I think the first one I ever bought was on Amazon for probably $30, right? So what kind of lighting kit are you looking forward to buying now?
Ian A. Gray: So I am going to invest for the future with this. So I've done a lot of research on this and I think a three... I was initially looking at three soft boxes. I deliberately didn't go for the ring, the ring light because I wear glasses.
Stephanie Liu: That's true! That's true.
Ian A. Gray: So if you don't wear glasses then the ring lights are great. But if you wear glasses you can see there's big ring reflection in your glasses, which is not great. So I'm going to go for a set of three LED lights. And the reason for that is the LED lights are quite a bit more expensive than the traditional soft boxes. But the reason for that is just space because my office here which I'm going to be using is a studio as well, isn't that big? And also it acts as a guest bedroom as well, so if we have people to stay here I don't want like a massive lighting wicked stuff like that. So yeah you've got to be practical. But you know this is going to cost... So I haven't quite figured that out, it's probably going to cost between £200-300 which probably equates to probably the same in dollars to $300. bedroom as well so if we have to stay here I don't want to have likei a massive lighting wicked stuff right there.that.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah. Oh my goodness. I mean I I would even say that I first started getting away with just using the desk lamp on my desktop here. And then I would just position the light where it was just kind of like in my face. But I will tell you that you guys - Angela, Carol, everyone that's watching right now - I have two lights on right now plus I have my windows open. I am completely blinding myself so by the time that this broadcast is over I'm just completely like "Oh ok, I'm done with lighting."
Ian A. Gray: The other thing you got to think about is when are you going to do these lives. So during the day it's like no problem, I have my curtains open. But it's 10:00 p.m. and it's nearly half past ten at night, so I want to be flexible. So having a good lighting kit I think is going to be really important. And I know that live video for me is the big thing. This is what I'm known about, I'm speaking about it now, I've got a live show. So I cannot... Although I don't like spending money, I know that I need to. Lighting is going to be really very important for me so I think I just need to invest.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah. It's a business right off too. So I just tell my husband whenever I get a selfie ring light for my phone, "Oh, it's good work." So when you found out that you had the Android and everyone else was able to broadcast live from their desktop, that's when you discovered OBS and that's how I found you. Because this set up here for everyone that's watching and I know that Carol is watching too and she's an OBS user on PC as well. When I was stuck trying to figure out OBS you were my go-to. And so are you still using OBS or you've moved on?
Ian A. Gray: So for my show I'm actually using Wirecast. But I still recommend OBS Studio for lots of people. It's such a good tool I think for... Both have got their learning curves and actually I know some people that say Wirecast is more straightforward than OBS studio. I don't know. I don't know if I agree with that. I think OBS Studio... Once you get your head around it, it's kind of OK. But it was that initial stage, so I spent huge amounts of time trying to work out the best sets up with OBS Studio. Particularly for Mac users there are a few little hoops that you have to kind of jump through. PC users, it kind of just works, which is kind of ironic because all the Mac people beforehand were saying "Just get a Mac, it just works." When it comes to OBS Studio, it's actually the PC that just works. Just because of the way Macs... They manage sound basically. And I know this is an issue that you had. So at the time when I was a PC user, OBS Studio worked perfectly. And then in quite a few... So I launched my first course at the same time as a moving house let you do. But I launched this course in OBS Studio and there were all these Mac people asking "But how can I capture sound if bring in a guest on Skype?"
Stephanie Liu: That was me you guys! That was totally me in his Facebook Group like "No, no, no. Skype is not working. How do I make this work? Oh, and I want to play music. Ian, help me out!"
Ian A. Gray: So that was one of the reasons why I bought a Mac last year because I wanted to help all the Mac people and get my head around it all. So yeah you do need to get some other pieces of kit just to capture that whole idea. Whereas the likes of Wirecast, it just kind of does it all for you. It's all built-in into Wirecast. So that's one advantage of Wirecast, and the other advantage is multi-streaming if you're going to be broadcasting to multiple platforms, that's all built in as well. But you know the other thing, OBS Studio is free. It's totally free and it's got a really good open-source community, if you've got any questions you can get into the forums. So I do like that about OBS Studio, there's a lot of people doing it and a lot of people doing really cool things with it. So I still use it and I still recommend it although I do use Wirecast. Basically, I'm kind of platform agnostic. I think really it depends.
Stephanie Liu: At this point, yeah. You've gone from Android to iPhone, from PC to Mac. You're kind of everywhere! Ian A. Gray: I know. Other ones to mention there's like the one that a lot of people are talking about now is called vMix makes. So that's V-M-I-X.
Stephanie Liu: I've heard that! Is that a software or is that like a box that you connect to a DSLR?
Ian A. Gray: No, it's a software like OBS Studio and Wirecast. But the downside is that it's PC only. So this is going to be really weird. So we've had people kind of like switching to Macs for the high-end stuff. So this is really for like the professional TV quality stuff. People are actually switching over to PCs because you can build a custom PC and you know particularly things like graphics cards and stuff. So vMix only works for PCs. So if you're kind of like wanted to get onto the high level stuff then that might be something you want to kind of investigate.
Stephanie Liu: What's the starting budget for something to have like a vMix setup?
Ian A. Gray: You could get a computer built for about $1000 but to get the high-end stuff you're looking probably $2000, that type of thing.
Stephanie Liu: So pretty much kind of like a Mac desktop at that point. But would it only be dedicated to live streaming? Can you use it for anything else or is this just like no this is the only machine that you're...
Ian A. Gray: Yes! So it kind of depends on what you're looking for, but you can just use... If you've already got a PC, the important thing is that you have lots of memory and you have a really good graphics card because vMix uses the graphics cards for the streaming. So it's really good at that. So you can get by with just any kind of PC, but to get the most of its graphics cards... And you can use it dedicated, you can use it only for streaming, or you could run other applications on it as well. It could be your other piece or your main computer if you wanted.
Stephanie Liu: Very cool. And so someone had mentioned, who is it... Elaine! Oh Elaine says that she upgraded to a Mac and that she's going to be using Ecamm. Ecamm is awesome! I love Ecamm. When I saw... who was it? Oh my goodness. Why does this... Leslie, Leslie Samuel. So you guys, when he was testing out Ecamm he was just like, "You guys. I found out something really cool. Check this out!" And of course I feel like once you start live streaming you get into the live streaming geek community and like "What is that?!" It's awesome. I love it. I love how you could drag and drop images, video onto the screen, you could play recorded video, you could have the picture in picture. The only thing that stops me from using Ecamm is that I can't do interviews. Is there a hack for that?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah, there is a hack for it. In fact, somebody in the group, the Seriously Social group uses this. I think it's Joey. Yes, he does this. He uses ECamm. So yeah, you can. And it's basically using Loopback. So Loopback is the software that will take on a Mac, on a PC... Let's go back a little bit, on a PC. These tools can capture everything that's happening on your computer, the desktop audio if you want to call it that, so it will just capture everything that's happening. If you've got an interview, if you're interviewing somebody on Skype it'll just hear what you're hearing. That's the way it is. On a Mac it doesn't work that way. Say you have to basically root, and you're probably better at explaining this than me because you uses to use this on a regular basis.
Stephanie Liu: Loopback is my life.
Ian A. Gray: Yes, it's the way that you can kind of like connect audio from Skype so my voice is being kind of taken via Loopback into OBS studio. You have to kind of connect these different apps. Would that be the best way of explaining that?
Stephanie Liu: It is, yeah! I mean I kind of... In my head, because I'm a visual person, I kind of see it as you have all these... If you have Skype over here, that's like one river. And then you have another stream, which is like iTunes and you all want it to go heading into the ocean, and that's kind of where I see like Loopback is the one that kind of like meets everything together. That's how I try to explain it.
Ian A. Gray: So yes, you can use that with Ecamm. Ecamm by the way, Ecamm Live is Mac only. It's like, is it $29? I think it's $29, it's really expensive and it's so easy to use. The other disadvantage with it is that you can't create lots/multiple scenes like you can on OBS Studio. You could have like a scene that has a countdown timer and it's like a pre-showed shot. And then you can transition to the guest shot with both of you, and then you could transition to just you. There's a level of flexibility, but Ecamm doesn't give you that. But the other advantage with the Ecamm Live is that it gives you the Facebook comments directly on the screen which is so, so cool.
Stephanie Liu: That's nice. Yes. So I had experimented with Ecamm and it was really cool with the comments coming up when I had a dark background behind me. But because the commets come up as white, if I were to do it now I would not be able to see it whatsoever. So that's something to keep in mind. So I think you kind of quickly rushed over the hack between Ecamm and doing interviews. Are you saying that you could do Zoom and then share your desktop screen into Ecamm and then that's your branded live stream?
Ian A. Gray: So I'll be honest, I haven't tested this myself. It's on my list of things to kind of play with. But I know it, it's possible because I know people that are doing it. But I think yes, you would basically have your webcam and then you'd probably put an overlay. So yes, what you would do, you would have an overlay graphic with transparent cut outs for you and then a transparent cut out there for your guest. And then you'd put, you'd show your screen and have your guest kind of in one of those boxes and then you put your webcam under the other box. So that's how you do it visually. And then you would have to then have the audio coming from Loopback. I'm not entirely sure how that works because I haven't tried it, but apparently it is possible.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah. So I know that with Ecamm with the Loopback you just change your mic to say Loopback. But you guys, I'm going to have to go back into the show notes and I'm going to have to give you a link to Joey's show because he's the one that I feel like is doing the hack and he's doing it well. I tried it but I felt like Zoom was taking so much memory on my computer and with Ecamm that is was just "Whah."
Ian A. Gray: Yeah. That's the other thing to say. You need a powerful computer. And yeah this is why I was feeling very, very poor at the end of last year because I went for the high-end Mac. Because I knew I was going to do a lot of streaming. So you need a lot of memory and you need a lot of stuff, a lot of resources on your computer.
Stephanie Liu: So we do have one question about OBS from one of our viewers and she's a PC user. And so, Carol was saying that she was trying to do a Facebook Live interview using OBS. She's on PC, but for some reason she couldn't get the audio figured out. And I know that you and I were just like "Well, we need screen shots and all that stuff," but off the top of your head, what would be the first thing that she should take a look at?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah that's weird. It kind of should just work. It also depends on how you're bringing in the guests. I think it says that, but whether it's Skype or Zoom.. But yeah, you'll have to go into.. So in OBS studio you've got different audio inputs, so make sure that you set those correctly. I think it's called Desktop Capture or Desktop Audio that needs to be set. You can mute that, so you might have inadvertently muted that. So make sure you do that and also you can go into settings and then go to the audio. Just make sure that before you go live, you can just see all the levels, make sure that you're capturing desktop audio on a PC. It should just work. But maybe something weird is going on, it is difficult to say.
Stephanie Liu: Could it possibly be that they're rolling out new updates to OBS and then just something funky happened?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah it could be. OBS are releasing updates all the time, so it could be something like that.
Stephanie Liu: I laugh because when they roll out updates I'm like "Nope, not going to update because you're going to mess up my stuff and I cannot have that." I cannot have that, very funny. OK, so we've talked about... Gosh like we're geeking out so much. Thank you so much, Ian. We've talked about going live on mobile, going live through your Chrome browser, going live with BeLive, OBS, vMix we kind of brushed over a little bit and even Wirecast. Who would that be more geared towards? Is that for like concerts? Would that just be for regular entrepreneurs? Because I mean, you're even considering... Well, you are on Wirecast.
Ian A. Gray: Yeah. Well I mean part of the reason for that is that being a consultant and speaking a lot about social media tools I need to be in the know. So I want to be able to use all these tools to give good recommendations on these. I'm actually going to be using vMix very soon, not because necessarily I'm going to be using vMix, I just need to understand how it works. But Wirecast I really like because the new version of Wirecast, which came out I think it was last week, I want to say last week, and it's got lots of cool new features. So for example, it's got a Zoom-like feature built in, it's called rendezvous, so you can actually bring in a guest directly into the Wirecast without having to worry about Skype or Zoom. And you can have lots of guests and just put them in directly. That is still a relatively new feature and I need to play with it a little bit more, but in terms of ease of use it's so much easier not having to worry about all these different apps running in the background. So that's really good. And they've also got things like being able to import comments from Facebook, which is really cool. Also it does multistreaming, so if you're wanting to broadcast to more than one platform at one time it's all built into Wirecast, which is cool. So, to answer your question, who is it for, it's really for people who want to take things to the next level and people who may have for whatever reason just not got on with OBS Studio. But it requires an investment. Unfortunately, it used to be relatively expensive, it used to cost $500, and it's now gone up to 6-9-5, $700 which, I'm going to be honest, I think that's a lot. I think they are overpricing themselves slightly, but it is a good tool. But obviously, to spend $700 on some software you have to be very serious about it.
Stephanie Liu: And you've said a term that probably most Lights, Camera, Live viewers aren't familiar with and it's simulcasting or multicasting. Can you explain a little bit more about what that is?
Ian A. Gray: So this is, and I would not recommend that people do this until they become really, really comfortable with the tech, because there's a lot of things that can go wrong here. But at the moment we're broadcasting to Facebook Live. But you can also broadcast to other platforms as well. Live broadcasting is also on YouTube (YouTube Live) and there's also Periscope. There's even other platforms such as Twitch and we could go on loads and loads of different platforms. So if you're wanting to expand your audience if you've got a show you may want to you reach other audiences, say if you've got a huge Twitter audience then you may want to broadcast on Periscope. If you've got a really popular YouTube channel, then it makes sense to broadcast to that as well. So using Wirecast, and you can actually do this on OBS Studio although you need to use some extra software for this, you can broadcast to all of those at the same time - you can broadcast to Facebook Live, YouTube, Periscope. You need a very, very powerful computer to do that or you can use another piece of software or service to do that. What I will say before I get onto that, the problem with this is that your audiences can be very different. And also how are you going to... It's kind of almost difficult enough to manage the comments just to one platform, but if you've got comments coming in from all these different platforms, how are you going to be able to manage those? And that's the thing to think about, so bear that in mind. But yes, in order to do this you can either use Wirecast and have a powerful computer that can just do it. Or you can use a service such as restream.io or the one that I use is called Switchboard Live. So if you go to switchboard.live what it does is it allows you to broadcast to the Switchboard Live and then Switchboard Live takes that stream and it multicasts to all these different platforms. So it will then take the stream and stream it to Facebook, YouTube, and Periscope from your one stream, which is cool.
Stephanie Liu: Switchboard Live, huh? OK. And so this is an additional cost. This is another expense, right?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah well there is a free version, so the free version will allow you to do YouTube and Periscope. If you want to the Facebook, unfortunately yes, you do have to pay because you need... I mean OK we're going to get a little bit geeky.
Stephanie Liu: I love it. I'm at that point where I am just like "Ian, we've been hanging out for over a year now in Facebook Groups and geeking out." I know that some people are going to get lost at this, but there are some folks out there too they're just ready for it. So yeah let's talk why would you have to pay extra?
Ian A. Gray: And as I said this is the advanced level so difficult. I did not start with this. So the way we broadcast to all these platforms is using something called RTMP. You kind of don't need to know what that is except that's the protocol is called for streaming. Now in OBS Studio you don't need to worry about that because you can just select Facebook Live and then you just put in what's called the stream key and on your way. And it's that easy.
Stephanie Liu: And you're good to go, yup.
Ian A. Gray: But if you're going to be broadcasting to restream.io or Switchboard Live you need to select RTMP in the app and then you need to put in a stream key and a URL and that will broadcast to restream.io or Switchboard Live. Now the reason we've got this issue with Facebook is that Facebook they're so vague, but basically they say that they don't want you to broadcast to any other platform as well as Facebook Live using the API. Okay, so what does that mean? I mean I've spoken to loads of people about this and nobody knows, but except for the fact that tools such as Wirecast are not allowed to give you the option to broadcast to Facebook Live and other platforms. So the way around it is to broadcast to YouTube either from restream.io or Switchboard Live, and Periscope, and then broadcast to Facebook using RTMP instead of the Facebook Live API. Does that kind of make sense so far?
Stephanie Liu: For me it makes sense because I could kind of see how you're going. So you go YouTube and then you go to Restream and then it goes to Facebook Live versus the other way around.
Ian A. Gray: Yeah. So putting it very simply, from your computer you are broadcasting to the Switchboard Live and then Switchboard Live is then broadcasting that to YouTube, Periscope and then technically not Facebook. It's using RTMP to broadcast to Facebook so you are. Now the reason...So, restream.io and Switchboard Live are free for up to I think it's either two or three destinations. But if you want to use that custom RTMP, you have to pay. And so that's where they get you! So, you have to pay like $25/month. So, it's yet another cost. I mean OK, you could argue that's not expensive, but you're right it is just yet another thing to think about.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah and I think as an entrepreneur and there's other things that you're already putting aside. Like it's already what is it the 14th, so by the end of this month I already have to have all my expenses in for this quarter. And so my CPA is just kind of like "Look at all these expenses you've got like your e-mail CRM, your Facebook advertising..." If you're doing like monthly payments for Zoom Webinar which is like what, $55/month? And then BeLive is $12-14 and up or something? It does start to add up. So definitely something to consider. How are you like... Well, you're speaking all over the world and you've got all this and you've got your courses, so that's helpful for you. I would say one tip for any entrepreneur that's really interested in live streaming, one thing that's worked for me is you don't always have to buy everything new. You don't always have to buy everything brand new, because if you've heard Ian this entire time he's always upgrading to something new. So if he's like "Oh well I don't need this light ring any more" I'm like "I'll take it!"
Ian A. Gray: Yeah because a lot of us tend to suffer from shiny new tool syndrome and yeah, it's an expensive condition to have. Because you don't always need to have the latest and greatest. Do you need to get the new iPhone 10 or the iPhone 8? Well, maybe the iPhone 7 or the 6s is going to be absolutely fine for you. You're not convinced?
Stephanie Liu: I just... Well, no. I saw the price tag for the new iPhone. I think that's a whole entire new computer for me. I mean at that point I would imagine that the iPhone is going to like make my dinner regularly.
Ian A. Gray: They might add that feature, you never know.
Stephanie Liu: That's very, very true. So let's say you did have zero budget. If you could buy whatever that you wanted for your live streaming, what would you get?
Ian A. Gray: Well, if you've got a reasonably recent smartphone, either Android or iOS, then just use that. And if you've got a low budget, just look at upgrading little bits of that. Say a lapel mic, as I say, will make a big difference to the audio. You don't need to buy lighting if you go to a kind of very reasonably lit room, then just do that. If you gotta do it from your computer, one of the advantages in doing it from your computer is that you can bring in guests and you can share your screen. And that's something I do a lot. I want to share my screen and maybe even share my phone screen, so I want to kind of give a demonstration. But you can use OBS Studio for that and it works really, really well. Use Skype, you don't have to use Zoom. Yeah there is a free version of Zoom, but I think it cuts you off after 40 minutes. So, use Skype. It works perfectly well and it's working really well for the shared... There's not a massive reason for going for all of the expensive stuff. You can do that later on and that's how I did. I started off using OBS Studio, I invested my time in that. And then moving to Wirecast wasn't so much of a big leap for me six months later. So if budget is an issue for you then do it that way. If you have got like three or four thousand dollars just at your disposal...
Stephanie Liu: Oh, sure! Of course.
Ian A. Gray: Well you never know! And you know that live streaming is what you want then by all means, yeah! Get a custom PC built and get a really decent camera. I know some people that are doing that and they've got very successful businesses and they know that this is going to be huge for them. They're producing courses all the time. So I don't know a studio that will do this for them, but you don't have to do that.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah. I mean and I'll say it for everyone that's watching. For me with OBS, OBS does exactly what I need it to do. And I don't try to push it as hard as I need it to be as long as the content is there. And you guys if you find all of this information valuable... P.S. By the way, if you give us some hearts, some likes and share this out and just share the news of people that you could easily get started with Facebook Live without having to invest so much. For me I would say that for OBS, I'm cool with OBS, you know? I feel like I've been able to hack it a way that works for me and it works for my audience, and it's fun. Who knows maybe like I'll watch this episode a year from now and I have like my own studio... Hey, universe!
Ian A. Gray: Yeah, I think you are using OBS... Because you know we were talking about this before, I'm interested in finding out people who are using OBS Studio really well and the thing is... I think when you speak to all of these people who are really investing in live video, if you speak to them then they all kind of like say "Oh don't use OBS Studio, it's really bad" or "You need to use Wirecast or vMix, you need to spend like thousands of dollars..." and I'm thinking no, you don't. Yes, you can if you want to take things maybe to the next level and you've got this budget then fine. But you know what, if you're willing to invest that time and effort into using OBS and getting rid of some of the quirks, because let's face it they're some of that with free software, then it works really, really well. So I would say don't let anyone out there tell you you can't use that tool, that it's no good. Have a go yourself, play with it and stick with it. I think some people... I think it's kind of like the iPhone/Android thing or the Mac versus Windows. People get kind of quite religious about it and at the end of the day if it works for you, fine. I'm determined not to get like that. So I'm still using a PC, still using a Mac, still using Android, still using iOS because I think they've got their pros and cons. And I just think that people need to use the tool that works for them.
Stephanie Liu: Yes and I would even say too that if you are going to be using any of these tools for your live broadcast, just make sure that you always set time aside to practice. I've had so many people try to send me messages an hour before they're about to go live "I need to figure this out" and I'm like there's so many variables, especially if we're going to be using OBS or I would say even Wirecast. There's probably something... It's going to take a little bit longer than an hour or so and I say that specifically to Carol because Carol kind of messaged me that she's going to go live in a couple of hours. Carol, I hope this works out for you, but if you're still running into any issues this is the guy that you should talk to.
Ian A. Gray: Now I've got a panic call, but I'm so glad you said that because be prepared for things to go wrong. Things will go wrong and I can't tell you how many times things went wrong, but I did it. I've done it lots and lots of times. I did lots of test runs. I kind of weeded out what was going wrong and you need to be prepared for that. There is going to be a steep learning curve. You're probably going to have to spend weeks and weeks testing this out and be prepared for things to go wrong the first couple of times and as you get better and improve with things. So, don't let that put you off because there is so much power, as you were saying at the beginning of the show, there's so much power, so much benefit from live broadcasting. I think it is worth it, but you need to be committed to it.
Stephanie Liu: Yes. Very, very true. And so what are your tips for people when they're starting their live show? Because there's a difference between just going live and just hitting the "go live" button. But you and I both have a show, right? And so, one piece of advice that I give to people is really take into consideration how much time it takes to actually promote your show and what happens after the show. Because you still get views after the show and I think some people are like "I'm going to go live four times a week" and I'm like "Ahh, what about the rest of your week? What are you going to do? Your day job, your clients?" What's your advice?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah, definitely. Well, I I do it once a week and I feel that's enough because I know I've got to do it, I co-host. We can share the load, so if you can do that and get somebody else to do maybe the pre-promotion... So you've got the pre-promotion, if you're scheduling the show you can then obviously you can get, just a little tip there, you can right click on the timestamp and then that's the link to the show. You can then post that out on Twitter and Facebook and get people to be notified. So it's a subscribe to be notified of the show. And then you can send that out to your newsletter, list and do all that kind of stuff. And then of course you can do all of the post-promotion. So once it's gone live it becomes a piece of evergreen content. So if your show notes, if your post says "Join us live at 2pm." Then afterwards you then need to say 'Watch the replay where we talk about this." If you're going all out and it was a really good show, you could even download the video, send it to the likes of rev.com and get them... I mean if you really wanted to go all out, you could get them to convert that into a subtitle file, upload that to the video, and then people who are watching it silence can see that. But you've also got show notes as well, which you can paste in there. If you're wanting to cut down on the cost one tip that I've seen people do is to just get the subtitles for the first four minutes. And so that cooks people.
Stephanie Liu: Wait, but how do you do that? Because on Rev it just says OK your live video was an hour long, so it's going to be $60. How do you say specifically "On ho, just do the first four minutes"? Ian A. Gray: You can't, so the way you do it is you download the video and then you have to use some video editing software just to cut it and so you're just using the first four minutes. Stephanie Liu: Oh, smart! If I could just in the screen and hug you. Ahh!
Ian A. Gray: Actually if you're being really organized what you can do, you need to be organized for this, but say five minutes in you can then say to the camera "Okay, if you're watching this with the sound off, put your sound on now because the subtitles are going to go off" or something like that. So you're actually kind of getting people, but you've got them hooked and then they can start watching. So that really good.
Stephanie Liu: I love this! Like my face hurts now because I'm smiling so hard.
Ian A. Gray: And then you can embed your video on your blog. I think you do this, don't you? So you can embed that on your blog, you can be download it, repurpose it, all that kind of stuff. And then obviously for the show's structure itself, the thing that, I still forget this sometimes, but the first people that are watching the show are not your live viewers. It's the replay viewers. So something I try in there is I say, right at the start I say "Hey, thanks guys for watching the replay of the show. In the show we're talking about this this and this." And then a minute in or two minutes in you'll hopefully start to get some live viewers, so you can then start to address your live viewers and do it that way. It is kind of a bit weird thinking about this in time.
Stephanie Liu: It's like backwards, yeah.
Ian A. Gray: It's backwards, to think about your replay viewers first and then think about your live viewers.
Stephanie Liu: It's so funny because Jen Evangelista, she's in the comments, and she's like "Oh, that's so good!" And I know exactly what she's geeking out at. It's the whole Rev thing that you were just talking about. Elaine has a wonderful question, she says "When you're actually promoting your show, how far back do you go?" I'll say me personally I try to go a week if I can, but life happens, especially me as a mom... But you have your templates down, so it's good to go. What's your rule of thumb? What do you... in a perfect world?
Ian A. Gray: In a perfect world... because I'm the same as you - a week. Because basically you can schedule a live broadcast between a week and 10 minutes. So obviously a week, it gives you the most time to promote it so people can start to be notified. You can then start to... So, I use a tool. I'll either use Buffer or... You know, whatever scheduling out there. You can then start to load up all the tweets and all the other social media updates that you've got. So I tend to do one on the morning and then an hour before, and then either 10 minutes or actually "We're live now." So one of them will say "We're live in 10 minutes" with a link and then "We're live now" on Twitter. So I do that all in advance, which has really saved me a lot of time. So yeah. And then obviously if you're sending out to your newsletter then you need to give people a bit of time. Another hack, depending on the email software that you're using, but if you've got e-mail software that... Say for example, in the list, in the e-mail that you send out to people "I'm going to be live this week. I'll be talking about this." And then you link to the scheduled live. You should be able to then send another e-mail say like 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour before to the people who clicked on that link because you know that those people are probably interested if they bothered to click it, just to say "We're going to be live in half an hour."
Stephanie Liu: What are you using for that/ Are you using like Drip because that sounds like very...
Ian A. Gray: Yeah I'm not sure. I used to be on MailChimp and I can't remember whether... I think MailChimp probably doesn't do this, but it's been a while since I've been on MailChimp. I switched to ActiveCampaign last year, I really like. I know a lot of people are talking about Drip and ConvertKit, but I went for a ActiveCampaign because actually it was cheaper than MailChimp, it felt for me that at that point. And because I was building my membership sites and my cost, I mean... So we're getting geeky again.
Stephanie Liu: No, I love it! I absolutely love it. And everyone that's still here watching is just as geeky as we are, so...
Ian A. Gray: That's good, that's good. So for my membership site I'm using WordPress website, but I'm using Memberium for ActiveCampaign. So basically what that does is people sign up for my courses, they are added automatically to ActiveCampaign, and they've got different tags for the different courses that they may have signed up for. And then they go up to my website and they all have access to the specific courses that they've signed up for, so it works really, really well. I love it. But yes, that's what I do. It's very good for automation, but Drip will do this, ConvertKit will do this. Not sure about MailChimp because it's been a while since I've used it.
Stephanie Liu: So I'm on ConvertKit, but I think that if I were to do that like in my head, and viewers if you know how to do this easier, but in my head I would imagine if you click the link you're added to a tag ,and then that tag would probably be connected to a sequence, and that sequence will have your thirty fifteen marks. OK.
Ian A. Gray: Yeah, so it's a similar thing in ActiveCampaign. It's a tag and then you set up an automation. So if you clicked this link then yes, it would be sent to the people that clicked that link in the previous e-mail.
Stephanie Liu: Okay, so do we have any... Like it's already been an hour Ian and I just feel like I could ask you a million questions, but it's already late for you. Eleven o'clock now?
Ian A. Gray: Yes.
Stephanie Liu: Eleven o'clock for you and it's three o'clock my time, which means in San Diego the kids get out of school and they start jacking the Internet. So this broadcast will end. If there's any last minute questions for Ian about live streaming, whether it's about your mobile, your desktop, OBS, vMix, or even Wirecast because like that's your thing now, right?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah Wirecast... That's the kind of like I want to say the professionals tool, but that's not to knock OBS. Because you can be professionally using OBS. But yeah, I'm using Wirecast, which has a learning curve we'll put it that way. So I've lunched a course on OBS last year and this year I've got one on Wirecast which took a lot more effort to create.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah, yeah I feel like you kind of just wait until you cave.
Ian A. Gray: Yeah, I did feel a bit like that.
Stephanie Liu: What would you say is the learning curve for Wirecast?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah I think OBS Studio is quite simple, some people disagree with this, but I think on OBS Studio you've got different scenes and different layers, or different sources that you can add. Whereas with Wirecast you've got, they're called shots, and so you can have, which are kind of like scenes, so you've got scene 1 which could be your pre-show, scene 2 which can be dual screens, scene 3... In the same way as OBS Studio. But then you can also put a scene on top of a scene, and the scene below that, and you can do all these other things. So it just is a whole other way of thinking about the show that you're creating and then you got other things like they've got something called Wirecast Virtual Camera. So what you would be able to do in this is you would be able to, it's very difficult to explain, but what you can then do is you could... Instead of me seeing you on Skype I would see your live view in Wirecast. So you would set instead of your webcam and Skype, you would set it to Wirecast Virtual Cam and then you would be able to send me what you are seeing. So that's great, because if you are then changing scene at the moment the only way I can see that is by going to Facebook Live. But I see a delay of about 10 seconds with that. So that's another thing you can do in Wirecast.
Stephanie Liu: Very coo, very cool. So the one question that we have is from Jen Evangelista and she says "What will the original link go to? The scheduled broadcast?" So I think she was talking about the promotional plan that we were discussing. Yeah, it'd be your scheduled podcast link, Jen. And I'm a big advocate for scheduling your broadcast, because I can't tell you Ian how many times I've had a guest and they'll say like "Oh, I just need five more minutes." And you know you're already like "Ah!" But when they do that with a scheduled broadcast, I know for me because I use OBS I could just go back into publishing tools, I could push it out an extra five minutes if they need to because I would rather have my guest be cool as a cucumber, right? Versus on the show completely red faced and flushed. But I know that I don't think you're able to do that in BeLive or in ECamm, like you can't reschedule or push your broadcast out. Do you know that if you can?
Ian A. Gray: Yeah that's a good question. I haven't played with it. So you're probably right, I don't think you can. Whereas yeah, with OBS you're editing everything in Facebook, so you would go to publishing tools and then change everything there. And to be honest that's what I'd still do in Wirecast because I want more flexibility. You can mess around with... In Wirecast You can actually schedule broadcast directly in Wirecast, but I don't like to do that for the reasons that you say, I want more flexibility. What if a guest... Because the other thing is if you're scheduling a live, you need to go live within 10 minutes. Otherwise it's gone. So, doing what you're doing... If the guest has told you they've got problems then you need you need to go into publishing tools and change the time quickly, otherwise you're going to be in trouble. You'll have lost the post and you're going to have to delete it and start again.
Stephanie Liu: And that is not any fun because when we are talking about promotional plans and if you're promoting a week in advance, you've already sent your emails, you've had your pre-scheduled tweets...
Ian A. Gray: Yeah which is still a problem, if you're delayed about five minutes then if you've sent a tweet out that says "And we're live!" and you're not? It's better that you're delayed than they go to a dead link. But if you've got a guest I mean this is what I try and do is I've got a checklist that I'll send out to you to my guests. So make sure that you have a good upload speed, that your webcam is set. So you might think this is overkill, but I start streaming to Facebook half an hour before my shows and the reason for that is I've had so many problems in the past. If you find out half an hour before that your internet connection is like not working, you've got time to sort things out. But if you like do it five minutes before and the Internet isn't working, you've got problems. Because I've had to restart my computer. So the other thing I do have a checklist, I would be lying if I said I always follow it. But the aim is to follow this, so you basically about an hour before the broadcast I always do a fresh restart of my computer. Then I kind of force quit all the apps on my computer because I want as many resources dedicated to OBS Studio or whatever I'm using. Obviously then switch off any mobile devices or any things going on in the background. But then half an hour before I will do a quick speed test, assuming that's ok I will then start broadcasting to the preview on Facebook Live. And then maybe 5-10 minutes later my guest will come in on Zoom or Skype and check that everything is working well, that you get them all set up correctly, have a little chat, and then hopefully at that point, because you'll be a little bit more chilled out because you know that everything's working, and then you can go live. So that's the aim. That's the aim of what you should do, but you know life happens.
Stephanie Liu: I'm dying inside because Jen Evangelista, she's one of my good friends and every time she goes live I feel like she's always adding something new. And then sometimes things don't always work out the way that they want them to. But yeah, just practice. I think if any live stream that actually goes really quite well that's always a surprise. And I will say this one was very smooth. Very smooth. I've been keeping an eye on the comments and no one has been like "Oh, the broadcast is interrupted!" and I'm seriously telling you as soon as those kids get out of school they are taking my Internet. So instead of like me sitting on my lawn telling people like "Get off my lawn!" it's like "Get off the internet! I'm live streaming over here."
Ian A. Gray: Kids these days, eh?
Stephanie Liu: I know. All right, you guys. If there are any more questions for Ian... Nikola, thanks much for tuning in. We'll go ahead and we'll exit out, I'm going to go ahead and play our little exit music. Ian, it was such a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much.
Ian A. Gray: Oh, it's been really great. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.
ABOUT IAN ANDERSON GRAY
Ian is founder of Seriously Social; a blog focused on social media tools. He’s an international speaker, trainer, teacher, web developer and consultant. He has a passion for making the techno-babble of social media marketing easy to understand. Ian is co-founder of Select Performers – a family run web agency. As well as being a geek, husband, and dad to two kids, Ian is also a professional singer and lives near Manchester in the UK. https://iag.me/
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN
- Live Streaming Stats Every Entrepreneur Should Know
- How You Can Easily Start Using Live Video In Your Business Today
- Mistakes We Learned Along The Way That You Can Avoid
RESOURCES
STEPHANIE LIU'S LIVE STREAMING SETUP
MUSIC
- Candyland by Tobu
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