Live workshop: Mastering livestreams from beginner basics to pro tips

00:00 Hey everyone, this is another webinar from Riverside. We are live, it's pretty meta, we are live talking about livestream today. So we're both really excited to have you here. I'm Kendall, the community manager at Riverside, and this is Stephen. He's our video producer and podcaster here at Riverside. And we're gonna go through a few things about livestreaming today.

00:27 We're gonna talk about techniques to engage your audience. We are going to talk about technical setup. We're going to talk about what you can do after your live stream also to really get some more traction out of the content that you're creating live. So we're going to be getting into all of it. And as always, during these live sessions, our live chat is open.

00:53 So feel free to drop your questions in there. We'll try to get to as many of them as possible as we go through. But first we thought that it would be a pretty cool way to start to talk about live streaming and engagement with a little bit of a poll to get to know all of you guys. So I'm going to pull up a link to take this poll.

01:19 So let me set that. So if any of you want to join, you can click this link right here and it'll take you into the poll. And we're just gonna be asking today to start with, can everyone see it? We're going to be asking today to start with where you are all coming to us from. So feel free to type in your answers over here.

01:48 Pretty cool to see. I'm gonna show that again. The take the poll if anyone hasn't. So we've got some people from New Jersey. New Jersey seems to be a pretty popular one. Long Beach, Dallas, Colorado, Des Moines, nice, El Salvador. Really cool to see all of you here. couple fellow Floridians possibly. I'm in Tampa, and so I see South Florida up there, and maybe a couple others.

02:15 Very cool. Yeah, Germany, UK, Vietnam, we're international up in here. So really cool to see. We also want to know a little bit more about you all. So my next question over here is how often you going live? Have you never gone live before? you gone live once or twice?

02:40 Yeah, never. OK, we got some once a week, multiple times a week. Jerome in the chat saying once, Shout is saying a few times a year. If anyone wants to vote, I'll put that back up on the screen for you all that are tuning in live. Really cool to see that, okay, so we've got a lot of people who have never live streamed. So we're gonna be talking about the basics, but for you all who are saying that they've done it multiple times a week, we're gonna go into...

03:11 methods to make your live streams more engaging or step those up. So there's going to be a little bit of something for everyone. And then lastly, I just wanted to ask, and you can type it in if you are taking the poll. How does live stream fit into your content plans? Do you all want to go live and just live stream for the sake of live streaming to connect with your audience? Are you doing webinars?

03:36 Maybe you're recording podcast episodes and you plan on putting those, like recording them, then afterwards kind of putting them up as a regular episode. Let us know how you plan on live streaming. So we got regular live podcast recordings, building community, and some private live streams for subscribers. Very cool, the idea of private live streams. Record episodes and distribute later.

04:02 We got a few of those. Wow, they're really, they're coming through. Expanding your reach and audience. podcast, but I'm interested in the webinar feature. Great to know. Increasing engagement in real time. We're using, by the way, Slido for this. This is my first time using it. So really cool way right off the bat to engage people and hear from everyone. So love this.

04:27 Record a weekly show and then posting the episode to the podcast network. Webinars. Really cool. OK. So we've got a lot of different things going on in here. Stephen, did any of them stick out to you? I think this is a first of all shout out because this polling thing and the live responses top notch. This is how you created engaging live stream. I love all of this. The webinars is a huge deal. Obviously we do that here at Riverside, but I think building community, a live stream is just a prime way, especially you're doing podcasts.

04:59 Maybe you have a YouTube channel. The live stream is really a great way to kind of have that the real time community building, which it'll reward your most faithful viewers or listeners. Helping them feel connected to you as a creator or even as a brand But also reaching that new audience and we'll talk about some of my live streaming experiences And it is a great way especially on YouTube and twitch to reach people who have not seen your channel before seen your content And as we'll see like on YouTube those live streams can are sometimes

05:30 prioritized You know seeing that little live tab when someone opens their YouTube app can make a big difference in finding a new audience So yeah, really exciting I just want to point out this one here that says we do two big shows a week, three smaller ones. The Friday show we do live to get the community involved. Very cool. And this, you are really going above and beyond, whoever sent that in. That's amazing. So much content. So yeah, a lot of community building in here.

05:56 So that was pretty cool. Nice to meet you all. And we're going to get right into it. So. I want to start off, we're going to get into some technical aspects later, how to set it up on Riverside and everything like that. But I really want to start off with how to develop a clear and engaging narrative that resonates with your audience.

06:21 So, Stephen, I'll ask you, how do you develop that clear and engaging narrative? Like, how do you, like, how are you advertising live streams? How are you getting people to want to join? Let's start from there. Yeah, so I do a tech podcast. It's a weekly show and the weekly show is not live streamed, but there are special events. Maybe there was a big Apple event or other announcements. And I like adding the live stream as an additional broadcast in the week.

06:49 We have our regular episode and then we add a live stream because it is a great way to engage with the current community and attract new people. And so just to show we actually did a live stream with Riverside last week on the channel. And so you can see here. Let me There we go share my screen and so this was a past live stream This is last week and you can see 1 .2 thousand views which again our channel only has 1 .3 thousand

07:17 subscribers This is a great view count for that. We streamed it live using Riverside and one of the great things About it. Well, we'll get into maybe the editing and making it engaging later But to get the word out, we actually have a private community using circle Circle.so But this could be a Facebook group, private community could be a Patreon of followers, or just people who follow you on social media, advertising it way in advance and often.

07:44 So on our weekly podcast, we said, hey, we're going to be live streaming Monday, September 9th after the event. We want you to tune in. Here's the link. And I'm going to show you how you can set up a YouTube event that's scheduled for the future and live stream to that using Riverside. But just be early and often telling them when you're going to live stream. And honestly, a regularity in livestream is a great way to get people to tune in regularly. I know it sounds redundant, but when people know to expect it, they'll look for it.

08:11 Yeah, I was actually going to ask my next question was, how often should somebody be live streaming? So I would like to include more regular live streams in my own content strategy. But if you can be regular, even like once a week and a live stream, you can make it engaging with a lot of preparation. We'll talk about that. But even if it's just kind of like I see a lot of creators doing coffee talk or whatever, and they'll like on a Friday afternoon, they'll spend an hour and really just talking to

08:39 their community, addressing people in the chat, answering questions. And so you could find a way to kind of have that regularity. Maybe it's once a week. If that's a lot, once a month. But whatever it is, try to keep the schedule very consistent. Maybe it's the first Friday of every month. Your audience knows you're going to go live. Maybe it's an evening thing and they tune in. Just some kind of regularity. Once a week, awesome. Every other week, once a month, whatever it is, and keep that schedule ongoing and constantly talk about it on your podcast, social media, newsletters, all

09:11 And I think that a good point, Bob had just asked a question, so let's highlight that. Do you recommend live streaming to more than one destination? Yeah, I think using Riverside, you can live stream to a bunch of destinations simultaneously. And so it makes it easy. I would focus on a few platforms. So this way you can actually grow your audience there.

09:37 So when we live stream, I'll do mostly on YouTube and that's kind of the link that I'm promoting telling everybody to watch there. And if you also have a Twitch account or maybe a Facebook page, you you can add that as well. But it also depends on your use case. Like if you're doing a webinar style live stream, like we are now. 100 % I would live stream with Riverside's audience mode, because then you have the Riverside chat where you can bring in those lower thirds.

10:02 You can have the audience live call ins, which we'll talk about in a minute. so use case, it depends a lot. If you're just going for the most views possible, just stream it everywhere. Do YouTube, do Twitch, do Facebook groups, do LinkedIn. You can connect all of that in Riverside. But then also think about your strategy, what kind of content you're streaming, and maybe tailor that strategy to be more specific. I was also going to say that we're talking about doing this regular podcast or this regular live stream.

10:30 But it is also important, and we had talked about this before when we were talking about kind of the outline of what we wanted to discuss, when to live stream, when to not. Like, how do you judge what should be a live stream and what should be something that you just record on your own or with that guest? Again, I think if you're going to build in something to your community like a regular live stream, whether it's a coffee and Q &A or a weekly recap, depending on your content, then

10:59 it can just be your regular schedule. And that's the live deal. Otherwise, think about your niche and what either events or current happenings you could take advantage of as a live session. So for me personally, talking about tech stuff, if there's a big announcement, that's a prime time where I know most of my audience is going to be attuned to what's happening. In the news that day and so it's a prime opportunity to do a live stream because they're probably already looking for what happened What can I learn from it?

11:26 What didn't I hear somewhere else? And so trying to find in your niche, you know if it's fashion week Which I think it's fashion week in New York either last week or this week, you know, and if that's the fashion month. Yeah, Right, so that's a prime time. Hey do do a live stream about that if you do content about like a movie or TV reviews You know, you're talking about a TV show Do a live stream the day after an episode airs or even that night after the episode airs. And so find in your niche how you can tailor that.

11:53 If you have a, if you're a company or a brand and you have a big product release, prime opportunity. People are going to have questions about it. Is it a new feature? How can they apply it to their workflows? Do a live stream so you can interact with your audience in real time. Yeah, and I also think I wanted to mention the fact that when we're talking about what to livestream and whatnot, there are a lot of things that you can end up turning into a livestream and you could just have that, but you wanna make sure that your livestream is worthwhile for people to tune in live.

12:22 There has to be an aspect of it that makes it like, I need to watch this live or if somebody watches it back, they'll say, I wish I was there for the livestream of it. So for example, like what we were doing earlier during this webinar, this livestream. is we were posting questions and having people write in or answering the questions in the chat. It's a great way to get people to want to tune in.

12:48 Also some of the features that we have in Riverside, for example, showing comments on screen, which actually Timmy had asked about and we are going to get to, Timmy. I'll actually show that on the stream while I do. Yeah, so as we're doing that, we want people to feel like that they wish that they were there during that live stream. So some of those, some of the things that you can do is mentioning people in the chat.

13:13 That's number one. You can also ask questions and react with your answers. like exactly what I just did with Timmy, is saying, hey, I saw your answer. I'm actually gonna put that on screen and show people that you're listening and paying attention. It'll get them to want to engage. So looking at you, Timmy. Also asking follow -up questions. So maybe you're getting a question in the chat.

13:39 If you have a follow -up question that you want to ask, you can ask it right on screen. Because people, when they're tuning in live, want to be acknowledged and feel like they're part of the conversation. Another thing you can do is have live call -ins. So people can call into your show, which we have on Riverside, and you can interact with them. It's a great way to encourage interaction. But there has to be a benefit to engaging live.

14:06 And Stephen, you put it really well. I wrote it down. It says, live means access to you as the creator, brand. People want to be able to access you. So tell me more about that, because I definitely want to dive into that part. Yeah, I think especially in today's internet world 2024, while people do connect to brands and we even see a lot of affinity for Riverside, like in YouTube comments and such, you as

14:32 a creator and even as a person attached to the brand, people do want to feel like they have access to you because they like your content, they're learning from you, they're entertained, they're inspired, whatever it may be. And they would love to know that there's an opportunity for them to really engage with you quote unquote, like one -on -one where we can interact specifically. And Dean Lampman actually has a great question about doing like premium live streaming events with gatekeeping and how you can do that with Riverside, which is a great question.

15:01 And that makes it even more personal to say, you know, there's people who are paying for bonus content, early access to my content. Maybe you have an actual paid service or product and you could pull that list and say, I'm going to do a live stream specifically for our customers, our clients, or those who are subscribers to our content. And then you can even greater connection then because that's even feels like a closer knit broadcast. And Dean, there's ways to do that. You can do a YouTube unlisted video and I'm going to show you how to set that up in Riverside in a moment.

15:30 And also other platforms like Discord and Twitch allow for those kinds of private streams. Circle, the community I mentioned before, I'll find a link as Kendall asked me the next question in a moment and I'll send that because Circle actually has a great private live streaming capability that you can integrate with Riverside as well. I actually using the new the new lower thirds, I'm actually going to put the link in right here right now.

15:57 So here is a link right on your screen. If you want to click on that to see circle and check that out. It's a great community platform. And as a community manager, it's definitely something that's really on our radar. I'll show that again, just in case you weren't able to get to that. So I want to talk about, I see a lot of questions in here about the technical aspect.

16:22 So I'm wondering, and I'll actually take this in the live chat, do you guys want to go into technical aspect of that now, of how to set up your live stream? Or do we want to talk about some ways to engage people that are tuning in? So feel free to leave. we got technical, we got engagement, tech, tech. All right, I'm going to go. yeah, I'll cover some engagement in the technical too. We'll do both, we'll do both.

16:49 let's do a little mix of both. I love this live aspect of it. This is fun. So, and again, we're reacting to your comments, we're listening to what you're saying, and it becomes this fun, really interactive way of recording. So, Stephen, I want to go through a few of the technical aspects of how to, let's start with how to set up your live stream, and then we'll go into all of the live streaming

17:15 capabilities. that we have and speaking of live stream capabilities, one of my favorites is these lower thirds as you can tell from what I'm keep putting on the screen. So I'm just gonna start this chapter off, technical tips for live streams. Amazing amazing. Let me share my screen and we'll get right into it the First thing I did see one question about like audience info collection And I'll show that right before I jump into the studio

17:46 because this was a recent feature When you're in your Riverside account and you're looking at your studios if you click the three dots and go to your studio settings at the very bottom You'll see an audience info And here an audience registration option which you can toggle on. And when you toggle that on, when you send out the audience link from your studio, they will be prompted to enter their name and email address that you can then access later.

18:15 And you can download all that information for those who are tuning in and you want to gather that. So that's in the studio settings under audience info. Go ahead and enable that. So let's jump into a Riverside studio. And I'm going to turn off my camera in the studio just because I know that was a little distracting last time. So let's go with that. I'll say I'm using headphones and put my name here. If I could spell it really there and let's join the studio.

18:43 So here, so this is actually my personal Riverside account and I do have the live studio add on and that's something that you can pay in addition to a standard and pro account, which allows you to remove the Riverside watermark and stream in 1080p. But even if you're on a free plan, you can add multiple destinations. That's something anyone can do. So when you're in the studio here, you'll see the live stream tool here that has this dropdown.

19:09 And here's where you can access the audience link and turn that on and then add any social networks you would like. There's also a gear icon here. And this is the live studio add on features where you can then live stream to 1080p and remove the Riverside watermark. If you have, again, the live studio add on. No 4K live streaming just yet. 1080p is the highest, which gets really complicated with hardware and stuff for the 4K.

19:35 But anyway, now if you want to add multiple destinations, there's the stream to social menu down here. And I can click the plus icon, and all these destinations can be added just by logging in. I can log into my Google account and then apply a YouTube channel and have that as a destination. I can do Facebook. I could do LinkedIn, X, Twitch, and even TikTok. And those are all just kind of built in. But the custom RTMP destination is really powerful because with this, you can add whatever streaming service you want.

20:07 And this is actually how you would do like a scheduled live event in YouTube. And you can have multiple RTMP destinations. I'm actually going to remove this one. And I'm going to open a new window here off to the side. and show you how to schedule a YouTube live event. So give me half a second here. Are there any questions I could answer? Go ahead. just going to say in the meantime that also if you use the custom RTMP, you can stream to Instagram as well.

20:37 Yes, be careful with instagram because the crop is going to be a little weird. that's the only thing there So Seb had asked while you're setting this up, and it's a timely question, why do you use custom RTMP for YouTube instead of using the YouTube option? So the YouTube option right now, Riverside, cannot see a scheduled event to stream to that.

21:02 It's only kind of a stream live immediately right now. My particular preference is to schedule a live event in my YouTube channel because then I can add a custom thumbnail, title, description, and then I get the link early, the YouTube link, that I can then send to my community, post it on social media. And so that's particularly why I choose to do the the scheduled live event. And so let me share my screen here and we'll set up the live event.

21:31 And I'm using the Mac app right now. That is a, so there's some things that moved around. So, okay, here's the YouTube channel for my podcast. And let's go to the live studio, which is this symbol right here. And this is where we can schedule a live stream. So I'm going to schedule a live stream. you can choose information from a past event to kind of give you a starting place. So I'm actually going to choose the live stream we used last week. I'll click reuse settings and it kind of pre -fills all this information, which is great.

22:01 So I'm going go through these just real quick, whether it's public, unlisted, and then unlisted is where if you want to do a private stream and just do it to some paid members, that unlisted is what you want to use. But this is what the event now looks like here in YouTube. You want to make sure that enable auto start and stop. are toggled on. This way when you start recording in Riverside, it'll automatically push it to YouTube. And when you stop, it'll automatically stop it.

22:26 And then here is where you get your stream key and stream URL. So let's choose the stream key first. I'll copy this and go back over to my Riverside studio, go to the RTMP destination, and the stream, what did I do? The stream URL? I forgot what I pulled first. That was the stream key. So let me go back and put that in the stream keys section.

22:51 And then for stream URL, I can pull the stream URL here from the YouTube Studio and put that here. And then for your own reference, you can name it as a destination. So this is for particular live stream that you're scheduling. You can know what it is you're enabling. So that's it. I added my RTMP destination. You can see I titled it here. It's toggled on, meaning when I hit go live and record, I'm both recording in high quality and live streaming to that destination.

23:23 And now back in my YouTube studio, this event is just going to sit here and I can change the schedule when it's going to go live, but I can get the link using the share button here. And now I can share this YouTube link everywhere, my social media newsletter to my community. And this is the link they're going to use to tune in live once we start broadcasting. Plus I have that custom thumbnail I uploaded and I can kind of get my event ready there in YouTube.

23:49 And now here in Riverside, it's ready to go and I can start streaming. I can also enable Riverside audience mode if I do want to stream to both of those places, maybe for some live call -ins and such. And this is also great if maybe you're doing a webinar and you have a particular part of your audience that you want to be able to do live call -ins, maybe like for your internal team. But you also want it to be able to be seen by a much wider audience, maybe even thousands of people.

24:15 You can do both. So you can give people the YouTube link for just kind of public viewing overall. And for your closer knit community or maybe your internal staff, for the company, you can give them that audience link so they can do things like audience live call -ins. And then I can add multiple destinations. I can log into my LinkedIn account, log into my Facebook page, add a second RTMP destination for Instagram, like Kendall was saying. and it will go to all those destinations at once once I hit go live.

24:43 And it's still both, just to reiterate. Once I hit go live or start recording, it's gonna go live to that link and it will be recorded just like you know and love in high quality video and audio and you get all the Riverside benefits of the separate recorded tracks. Your screen shares and media board files are in separate tracks and you get to use the Riverside editor just as if you were not live streaming, just like a normal recording. and I'll go into some engagement things in a moment, but any other questions or anything about the technical side?

25:12 We have a bunch of questions, but I actually want to want to keep as I'm I'm sifting through all of them Let's keep rolling on into some of the technical engagement aspects of it. So let's talk about the Well, you take it away. You've got it So one of the things I do when I'm live streaming is I want to share lots of visuals. And so I do that two ways.

25:37 I'll upload video files to the media board and I'll share my screen. And so obviously you have the media board over here. You can have videos that you play during the live stream. And so these videos will play live as your live audience is tuning in on YouTube or Twitch. They will see these videos live. And so you can play those video clips, audio clips, all of that. But I also more often share my screen here in the Riverside studio.

26:03 And the great thing about that is Riverside puts it all together. So I'm kind of jumping over to the editor. This was our live stream. This record, this was live streamed last Monday and this recording, it was, it was live as well. And you'll see that as we go and talk about different parts of the news or aspects, I shared my screen. all those times and it's live so I'm kind of scrolling websites sharing the tabs and you see Riverside formats it automatically and this is actually what the live stream look like

26:35 as well. Me and my coast would go in picture and picture over here the screen share would be large and then when I stop sharing my screen it would go back to me and him side by side. So just doing the simple act of sharing your screen sharing a tab a news article or any application on your computer is a great way to add some visual elements. Or you can also have slides pulled up, maybe it's Google Slides or PowerPoint Keynote, and then you can share that application here in the Riverside Studio and you can share those

27:08 slides live as well. And you see you have all those options, you can share a tab, you can share the window, you can share your entire screen. And a great way to do that too is I actually have a second monitor attached to right here so you can see that external monitor I can actually share that entire screen here in the Riverside studio and if I want to open other applications or maybe I had my full screen slides over here I can do that and share it as well and so that's a great way also to keep whatever's on your main desktop private to kind of have that secondary

27:41 monitor going and I can share this stop sharing and again separate tracks every time you share your screen and the Riverside editor puts it all together automatically. And you'll see, I'll just go actually back to the recordings page for that live stream. This was the live stream right here. And I'll you what, I'm going generate some show notes while we talk. that was so fast. Just kidding. I didn't have to wait at all. So if you go down, look at all these screen shares that I did during the live stream.

28:11 And you'll see you can actually download a individual track for all of those if you want to edit it outside. But honestly, there's no reason to do that because I just jump into the Riverside Editor. every screen share is automatically formatted for me and i have to think about it literally takes no editing after the fact We actually have a question that is perfect for this time. So we have a question from Samuel who's saying, I want to do an intro opening to my podcast.

28:41 How can I do that? So we're just talking about the media board. Show them how to do that. So if you want to do an intro one of the other recent features is hiding and showing People and so here in the Riverside studio I can hide myself and I can also hide any other remote guests You'll see here the your backstage you're hidden from the session and what I would do is upload your intro to the media board here in Riverside and I'll see I thought

29:09 I had an intro here saved a video clip. This is actually an older Riverside mobile video But if I wanted to, I can play this intro in the media board. And if I was already live streaming, this would now be playing. This video is now playing for everyone viewing. It's also being recorded. The Riverside editor is going to put it all together for you. And then once the intro ends and I'm ready to go live, I can be ready by going over to the People tab.

29:36 And once the intro ends, I'll click Show and me and any of my remote guests or co -hosts and We're ready to go. So there the intro ended. Now I'll click show for myself. And boom, we played the intro and we're live. Live streaming, talking, intro played seamlessly. And yeah, that's how you do it. I would use the media board for that for sure. Awesome. And we're going to keep on going with this, but I do just want to say we have Karen on the chat saying, can you please provide a link for trainings on Riverside?

30:09 I need much more basic training. So if anyone is feeling like they really want to dive into a demo, a walkthrough of the entire Riverside platform, I just want to shout out that we actually host a live demo every month. The next one is on October 1st. So here's a link to the live demo. I'm just going to drop this here. You can. put another tab for now, sign up later for anyone who really wants to go through everything about your Riverside Studio.

30:35 So we'll definitely get to that. And if I could also share, can I share a secret video? Is that all right? absolutely, this is, everyone live can get all the secrets. So let me know if you see that link pop up in the chat, Kendall. Did that YouTube link show up? I misspelled walkthrough. see that, you did, but that's the beauty of live, you know, we can misspell things and it's because it's live, yeah.

31:01 video will be releasing soon on YouTube but because you're watching this webinar live again a great way to encourage engagement in a live webinar to say only you watching live get access to this. That YouTube link is actually to an over 35 minute walkthrough where I go through very methodically and slowly literally everything in Riverside from your studio settings to recording to live streaming to editing everything.

31:26 is in that video. There's lots of chapters so you can skip around. Now in that video I might show some features that are still rolling out to everyone. So because you are live, your community, we are asking you, you know, you see an unreleased feature, keep it secret, keep it safe, to quote Lord of the Rings, but that full walkthrough will literally give you everything, everything you need to know. So there's that.

31:51 I wanna go through, let's go on to chat because I wanna talk about the OmniChat. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the great things about Riverside's new live streaming tools is you get to pull in all the comments from different platforms. I'm going to try and pull up an example as I talk, but if you connect your Twitch account, you connect YouTube, Facebook, all of those live chats, whenever someone sends a message

32:17 to you using those live chats, you will see that message in your Riverside chat. And so I'm looking for my OmniChat. Here we go. We can put a link. to this video. I'll put it in the chat window for everyone watching live. This talks about the OmniChat feature and I'm going try and make sure I spill everything right before I hit send. There you go. And this actually shows the entire process and

32:45 on, are you sharing your screen right now? No, I was just sending a link in the chat. I'm going to share my screen right now. There it is. There it is. The beauty of live. So let me select my thing. Sorry, give me one second. My screen share. I have so many windows open trying to provide all the engagement here. And here it is. So this is the video that we just sent in the chat.

33:13 And when someone sends a message like from Twitch, You'll actually see it appear here in the chat in Riverside and you even get to see the little destination logo there in the chat window as well. So you can actually see what platform that was coming from. So that message came from Twitch, which is really cool. And I also go over to if you were watching on Twitch, what they would see. And so if someone was watching on Twitch, someone sent that comment.

33:39 When you broadcast a comment, when you're in your Riverside studio, you're doing your live broadcast. And you type in the chat and hit send that will be sent to all the destinations at once. So someone watching on Twitch or YouTube, they will see your message. And so this is the host saying, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today. They'll see that everyone watching on the different platforms will see it there. And so here you can see kind of what multiple chats look like. Here's a chat from Twitch.

34:05 Here's a message from someone watching using Riverside audience mode. And like what Kendall's been doing during this live broadcast, you can show these comments on screen. no matter what destination they're coming from. And so you will see the little logo of the destination there in the lower third. And then, yeah, great way to engage across multiple platforms, just right built into Riverside, which is really cool. Yeah, you literally like hover over the comment and it just, you can set the timer for how long you want to show it and you just press show on stream and it's right there for you.

34:37 So really cool feature that I, as you can see from this, from this event that I love to use. So working our way down this panel on the side that you have. So we already went through people, we went through chat. Let's go through brand really quickly. And then I want to go, I want to go through text as well. So brand this is where when you have the live studio add -on you have many more customization options If you don't have the live studio add -on you actually get two color

35:08 themes You can choose the Riverside theme which you know and love and the news flash theme I believe is available just with you have regular plans and Not only changes the color background of the studio, but also change gives you some different name style colors here as well Now what I've done is because I have the live studio add -on I went to the custom section and let me actually change this.

35:33 I'll go back to that setting in a minute, but you can actually add a custom image background. And so you can see kind of lightly behind the video, that custom image background, which is great for really branding it to your content, to your podcast. And I also use that background in all, even my regular video podcast. So if someone... tuned in weekly, you see that kind of background behind our videos.

35:58 It's even more prominent when I'm sharing my screen. So this way your live streams are the same brand as your regular content. You can also do a brand color via hex code, so really exactly match your brand. And then that also applies to the name styles. So down here you can choose different name styles. Particularly I like the bold, like that all caps look. And remember, We talked about this in a past webinar, which is why you should just tune in every month to our live demos so you see all these features.

36:27 You can add a title. So if I want, I can do a podcaster here or whatever title you would like. And then even adjust the name size. Maybe you want the names to be really big. You have a big special guest. Go large with that size. And I can still, and I can choose from different color themes here for the background color and the text according to my brand. I'm actually going go to a different brand color to kind of show that off a little more. And look, now you have, there you go.

36:53 Go ahead, Kendall. and I love to do the subtitles at the bottom so that like if somebody is coming on from another show or something. While we're talking about branding, Matt had had a question. I've had trouble with branding the waiting room. Is the studio background supposed to also show in the waiting room when a guest is waiting to be brought in? Waiting room is for business customers. So if you want to brand the lobby specifically, that's part of our Riverside business platform. That's why you don't see that option here either for that.

37:21 the, yeah, good. I was also going to ask, I want to move on to the text option because we're talking about these texts. So this is by far my favorite thing that we can do with the live studio. So let's share that off. sure. So these are all the lower thirds that you can add. So Kindle's obviously been showing your comments on screen, which is a great way to engage live.

37:48 But you can also create lower thirds and even create links to lower thirds like this, where someone can click that little icon if they're watching in Riverside audience mode and actually visit that link. But creating these lower thirds are awesome because again, it carries over your studio branding, which is another important part of really nailing down that branding. We can do something like, let's see, Riverside Live. That'll be the title for our lower third.

38:13 Then I can go in and customize it. Do both large, medium, or small sizes. You can change the color here, again, according to the branding style that you have. Left, center, or right to justify. And then the best part is you can set a timer. So once you show lower thirds, you don't have to think about dismissing it. It can just happen automatically. I'm going put this one at five seconds just so we can see it quickly. And when I click Save and Show, it's going to show that lower third right on screen.

38:40 can see the timer counting down here in the studio and after five seconds it goes away. I can go in and edit previous lower thirds that I've created by editing the text here. I can duplicate them, then show them throughout the whole time. This is great if you have sponsors for your podcast or if you're talking about a new product launch or feature and you want to link to a landing page on your company's website or your brand. Create those lower thirds. You can add that link using the paperclip icon and then the link will appear there.

39:07 I'll tell you what I'll add. link there and visit us here. And I can save and show and there's that link that they can click and visit the website there. Love the lower thirds. Yes, same, and I love being able to set how long they are and I love that they can become clickable links. We have Art and Gerard in the chat who are both asking about custom branding within the live studio.

39:34 So they were saying about being able to add a logo or a background that is an image possibly. Is that possible to do? So we can add a logo. I'll add the Riverside logo file here. And then you can place it in a few places. You have kind top left, top right, and bottom right corner. And then the video frame, this is a key thing to think about.

39:59 At the bottom of the branding tab, you have the ability to either fill the video frame or fit the video frame. And this makes a big difference, especially if you have someone else joining the studio. So I'm actually going to try and do something a little crazy here. I'm going to add a second guest. Here on my computer. I have to open a second web browser for this so hang tight for one second I'm gonna go to that guest link and The reason why I'm doing this is because when you have multiple people

40:28 that fit Option chains changes significantly what you can do with that background So here's what it looks like when you have two people in a studio And so the normal fill you know it's just gonna zoom in on everybody's video. It kind of fills the frame But if you really want to brand your studio for that live stream, you can play around with custom images. If you go to the custom option, so like our image here, and then you can create a static image that's 16 by nine, basically the format like for YouTube and Twitch and kind of

41:00 embed your logo. You would have to create this graphic outside of Riverside, but kind of put your logo or other information around the video frames. If you're good keeping it in that full 16 by nine ratio for you and other remote guests. and kind of creating a background image to really customize what it looks like on the receiving end. But if you just want to add your logo here in the studio, you can upload that logo here in the branding tab. And then of course you could do the custom background image here.

41:27 And we have, can do a solid color if you would like. And I think you can upload multiple images if you want to like change them as you go. So those are some solutions there. Yeah, Gerard was saying that his question was about the lower thirds, not logos or images. So when you're in this brand panel here, you are able to set the brand color, as you can see right on Stephen's screen. When you do that, that helps you be able to set whatever lower thirds in those colors that you'd like.

41:59 Does that help you, Gerard? Let me know in the chat. Yeah, Stephen, keep going. might be asking about like animated lower thirds, which I know a lot of people like to do uploading an animated GIF maybe. We don't have support for those kinds of lower thirds just yet. So any lower third you want to create has to be created using the text tool here in the studio, which you you have the automatic show, the linking and all of that. We don't have a way to upload kind of your own lower third image files with alpha or transparency just yet.

42:29 I think that might be what he's asking. Okay, and you are right because Gerard says, yes, animated lower thirds. So I'm glad that you got that. I also just wanted to take a second to say that when we're doing these webinars, live streams with all of you, a big part is also getting your feedback. So as we're saying live and engagement, we're also taking your comments and your thoughts and what you'd like to see in the future.

42:58 And we're sharing that with our team. So really appreciate the feedback in the chat. And it's definitely something that we're gonna be communicating to the team, especially as we continue to really build out these live streaming features. And one of the cool parts about live streaming through Riverside, I feel is that at the end of it, you get all the benefits of Riverside in the backend. So by that, I mean that at the end of it, you get your separate recording tracks.

43:24 you also get a transcript of your entire conversation. So you can take that and create a blog post or a newsletter. You get all of the show notes. You can get AI generated chapters and AI generated magic clips. So all of the things that you get with every Riverside recording, you're also able to get with your live streams. So you can have a live stream, an idea that people can use is.

43:49 that maybe they do the live stream for their Patreon or their subscribers. And then in a week or two, you can post it. So there's a little bit of a delay in doing that so that people can tune in live, but then you can also continue to share that content and really give your content more likes so that they can continue to get some traction there. And a couple things, so this was the live stream here and it looks just like a recording in Riverside because it is.

44:17 It's just still a high quality recording. You could generate those magic clips like we did for this episode. And when you jump into the recordings page, like I showed very quickly, you get those AI show notes. You have the summary. If you're uploading your video to YouTube, these keywords are perfect for YouTube tags. So you don't even have to think about it. You just copy these, paste it in the tag section. You also get possible titles, which is amazing. sound bites, and if you didn't know, you can actually generate show notes per edit.

44:46 So like what we do for our show, we record an episode and then we record some bonus content afterwards. But you might want to just generate show notes for a particular edit. Well, if I go down to an exported clip here in my dashboard, then I can see the generate show notes for this particular edit. It's maybe recorded multiple episodes in one run. Well, after you edit it all and export that final clip,

45:11 you can generate those show notes and then this way the timestamps and everything will be just specific to this edit to your your full episode. And I also want to make a note because some people in the chat are talking about blurry live streams. Rich, I see your comments. So Stephen, I know we have a little bit of a trick for this. If you want to go into the studio and show something that you can do to help the quality of your live streams.

45:37 Absolutely, so you quality is always going to on bandwidth, someone's computer, and if you have a remote guest who might not have great internet, it's going to affect your live stream quality. So this is a pro tip right here. I'm going to go back into the studio settings, hit clicking the three dots, go into settings, and I'm going to scroll all the way down again, and you'll see under the advanced section for my studio is the option to enable pause uploads.

46:04 What you want to do is toggle this on. So I'm going to toggle this on. And now, once I go in to record my content, I actually have to start an actual recording so you see the upload progress. Now let's see if I put my real camera on there. I'm always so shocked to see how many options are on this. You have so much equipment. A dream. Yeah.

46:29 So once I want to go in the studio, so let's say I'm gonna start my live stream. I forgot I had so many guests already I Forgot I forgot let me leave They've been waiting. They've been waiting this whole time. Let me leave the studio all these tabs Okay, and I closed the tab that I was getting ready to record and how do you like that? Let me go back. I'm so sorry This is live live and in person. I would go to this record using headphones.

46:56 Look at how fast. Boom. All right. John Smith is still here, but that's fine. So now what I can do is I'm going to start the recording. Let me actually toggle off my live stream destinations, which you can do so easily without disconnecting them. I can just toggle them off and now I won't be live streaming. So let's look at that. So I'm going start the recording. We'll pretend this is a live stream though. So the countdown hit zero. Now we're recording and live streaming. Let's say John Smith over here.

47:21 He's hotspotting to his phone. And so his quality is dropping. Well, so here's now what I can do that I enabled pause uploads in my studio settings. I can go to John Smith over here and expand his little person tab. And at the very bottom, you'll see pause upload. And what Riverside does by default is it is always uploading the video and audio that you're being, that's recording for multiple reasons.

47:47 One, so you don't have to wait as long once you stop recording. because it's basically been uploading this whole time and you're ready to go after just a few moments. But also if something were to happen catastrophically, someone loses power, their internet completely drops out, you should have the recorded video and audio up until the point of that instance. But by pausing uploads, that means that your web browser on your computer and on the other person's computer, it's still saving your high quality video and audio locally to your

48:15 device. So it's still there. It's not that you stopped recording. but it's not uploading it to your Riverside dashboard right now, because I paused the uploads. And so you'll see the upload progress is going to slowly drop because we stopped uploading. Same thing here, you'll see upload paused for myself and my remote guest. Now, if just one person's quality is dropping or becoming pixelated, try just pausing their upload.

48:42 This way your video and audio is still uploading and you're still in high quality. If you find that everybody's getting blurry, and you really want to save all the bandwidth for the live stream, pause all the uploads, you're not sacrificing any recording or anything like that, I paused all the uploads, and now hopefully live streaming will be clearer, less pixelated, and when I stop the recording, that will trigger all the tracks to start uploading once again. And so you'll see you're going to start at a lower percentage, because typically when you stop a recording, it's already at like 80, 90 percent.

49:12 Well, now you're going to have to upload the entire file. If you went for a long time, maybe you did a two hour live stream, It's going to take a little while to upload the full video and audio tracks for everyone, but it will still upload and you still get all the benefits of the high quality Riverside recording, but your live stream is also in higher quality as well. And Curtis says, pro tip right there. A few people that are going to love to get that tip. Thank you.

49:38 Now that we've kind of talked about all the technical aspects, I'm going to go into the Q &A. I've been collecting your questions as we go. But I just want to say that all of these different tools that we showed you, whether that's showing text on screen, whether that's the OmniChat and showing those messages on screen, what you really want to do in your live stream is make it as engaging as possible. So you can utilize all of these different features to create those engaging live streams.

50:05 And there's also a lot of forgiveness when it comes to live. People understand that they're watching somebody live. if you hit a snag or something and you're trying to open a window, for example, you can say, I gotta pull this up. Give me a second. Like live stream, if podcasting is about authenticity, then live streaming just takes that to a whole other level.

50:33 So embrace the things that you can do, the features that you have, but also you can continue to interact and have fun with people. If you want to use one of those polls, you can like what I was talking, what I showed in the beginning. So that's just my kind of summation of all of the features that we just showed. is whatever you gotta do to continue to create that engagement.

51:03 let's talk about, so we talked about all of the things that you can do with the Riverside Studio. So now I wanna just quickly jump into some of the questions that we had. And I apologize if we don't get to your question, but hopefully we will. So one question, this is an easy one. Karen asked if I can show again the link to Circle.

51:29 using my favorite lower third tool, here you go. Here is a link again to Circle. Jesse asked, does the chat integration to YouTube work with the custom RTMP integration? No, that is a good point. That is good point. If you want that OmniChat integration, you will have to log in with your YouTube account and connect it that way, which then again precludes the scheduled event things.

52:00 So good question. That is true. That is accurate. Another question that we had from Bernard, can you share a tab with a live stream of a news event such as a press conference or a political debate? You can and you can share audio from a tab again be mindful of like copyright issues and fair use, you know, if you're Re -broadcasting something there might be issues with that. You know, if you're just sharing clips of something, you can do that, Let's see.

52:30 We're not streaming on youtube right now, right? If you if you're on a mac If you're on a mac, there is an application called downy which is a great tool for like if you see a news clip on like a news website like New York Times or something, you can actually download that video clip and then upload it to your media board and share it that way. Again, be mindful of copyright, fair use, you know, just playing short portions of clips and then commenting on it rather than rebroadcasting a whole thing.

52:58 I'll find a link to that too. And another question from Art. When will we be able to B -roll in to add role in video clips slash files during a live stream as well as in the editor? So we showed you how to add from the media board, but I will say for everyone joining this webinar that adding B -roll into your editor is definitely something that is on the team's

53:23 radar. So I really hope to have some updates for you, some really exciting updates for you actually on that as well. Jerome had asked, how many video channels can you run in Riverside at one time? And Jerome, I'm just going to ask a follow -up, which is, are you talking about how many places can you live stream to? Are you talking about how many guests you can have in your studio? If it's how many guests, you can have up to 10.

53:48 guests, yes, then up to 10. I also want to highlight really quick, Dean had asked, Do you have a professional services team or offering that can help a company implement some of these things if we're short on staff or people with tech skills? Is this something that any vendors in the market do? So if you're looking for a business plan, we can connect you with the business team.

54:14 But again, I'm just going to show the link to our next live demo because if you're really looking for a walkthrough of everything, I recommend joining for that. That will be on October 1st. But if you go into our webinars, riverside .fm slash webinars, you can find one of our previous live demos if you want to watch along there. We also just give a shout out to Bernard watching from New Zealand.

54:43 Wild. Sorry. my goodness. Very kind, very kind. I should get some tea. Anyway, go ahead. and now Travis is flexing from Scotland. They're coming in from Scotland. So we've got a bunch of people all around the world. It's really cool. Yeah, and I do want Portugal. Wow, awesome. Canada.

55:08 I do want to before, because we just have a few minutes left, I want to show you a few more things just as you, if you want to keep your education on Riverside going. So first of all, I know a lot of you from this chat from the community, but for anyone who hasn't joined, you can join our community of creators and podcasters here, live streamers. It is almost 18 ,000 people strong right now and it is such a supportive and helpful community.

55:36 So highly recommend. joining there. We also, know a lot of you are talking about YouTube. We have a YouTube for podcasters session that we're going to be doing next week. Really excited about this one. So if anyone wants to join that webinar, just save this link right here and sign up after we're done because there is a lot to talk about with YouTube. just actually surpassed Apple Podcasts is the most listened to.

56:04 There we go. the most listened to, the place where most people are listening to podcasts. It's that and Spotify just surpassing Apple podcasts, which is crazy news. Also, you love Stephen, I love Stephen. Watch more of Stephen on our YouTube channel. If you have any questions at all, when I was typing this, was thinking of you, Stephen, I thought you'd like it.

56:30 More Stevens on YouTube. We've got a lot of Stephen there. So if you wanna get more, walkthroughs on anything. He also, not just Riverside tips, also just talking about different trends in podcasting. Highly recommend joining that. And those were all of the links that I had. I was just excited to show them off. I really love this lower third tool. Got it, tell ya

56:57 I did want to show very quickly, you know, audience live call -ins as a way to engage your audience. Just, had a video here that I wanted to demo. There's a lot, here we go. Audience mode explained. I'll share this link in a moment. But an audience live call -in, you're, someone is watching via audience mode on Riverside, this is actually what they see. And you can see the audience live call -in button at the bottom.

57:22 They can tap request live call -in. They actually choose a camera, microphone, and speaker like a remote guest would. And they can actually type in a question and you as the host will see that question and the live call -in appears down here. And you can actually accept that person in and they'll join you like a normal remote guest, like as if they got the guest invite link. And they'll join you in a side -by -side. And here I have my Finder pillow, ask a question live using audience mode.

57:49 You get a recording for that guest. You get the separate tracks just like you know and love from Riverside. and then you can eject them from the live call when you're done and you still get all that recording stuff. So I'll put a link to that audience mode video in the chat. Awesome. with that, one last question. Maggie said, one last check about numbers.

58:14 You said 10 guests total. Is that including call ins? with the 10 guests total, I would recommend, so we support 10 people in the studio recording simultaneously right now. If you want to do live call -ins, I would err on the side of having nine people, like nine people as a host, eight guests, nine total recording the whole time. This way you can have that 10th slot open for audience live call -ins, and you can,

58:40 have them enter and leave as you need. that's how I would do it at the moment. I don't know exactly what our limit, you know, our maximum is there, but that's what I would do. Awesome, and with that, we have run out of time, but this is one of my favorite live streams that we've done yet. This was a lot of fun. So I hope you all had fun too, and I hope you all learned a lot. And thank you so much for joining. This was a really great time.

59:06 I'd love hearing from all of you. Great having everybody. It was fun. Yeah. Until next time, thank you for watching. Bye