CAF2020 - Live-Streaming!

I’ve never had any interest in live-streaming, I barely watch YouTube unless I need to know how to fix my washing machine and I don’t really use social media.

So …. in 2020 I learnt how to live-stream!

As soon as we decided to go digital with CAF20 we realised that we’d need to live-stream content and since I was the ‘techy’ one, I drew the streaming straw. To be fair, didn’t hurt that I was on furlough!

After figuring out what on earth an RTMP key is, nearly getting kicked off YouTube and a lot of shouting at my laptop, I managed to get multi-platforming live-streaming off the ground.Camberwell Cat Show

For anyone interested in the technical side of things - I captured content via OBS and fed it through Restream to YouTube, Facebook & Periscope, embedding the YT link into our website live. But let’s be honest - no one is interested in the technical side!

It all kicked off on 13 June with the Camberwell Cat Show (thanks Matthew) and a few casual scheduled streams on Sunday.

Things really got going on Monday with Movie Night, arranged by Rosie Wilcox. We had showings of Prospect, White Girl/Black Girl & Everything Inbetween, Black Widow, 26 Objects and War of Words, all followed by live Q&A’s with the Directors. I spent all day logged into the same Zoom call on two laptops, explaining with faux confidence the system I just learnt to filmmakers.

The rest of the week ran like clockwork, with live poetry & literary readings, a debut of new work by the Stay Strong Route, short films by the Black Heroes Foundation and a live Eye Spy Quiz. We got away with only one Zoom bomb, which has since been edited out - so I’d consider that lucky.

*Update - An anecdote to leave you with. As a newbie streamer I did have some hiccups, but the most frustrating thing was working out how to avoid video lag. Most casual broadband packages aren’t up to the task. Soon after the festival we moved flats and I was negotiating with Virgin to increase my speeds in anticipation of a winter of streaming. When the Virgin rep checked my account, he immediately offered to double the package for free, saying - “What have you doing? You’ve more than double the uploads than anywhere in your neighbourhood “