Live Video From a Phone, Broadcast to Anyone

A broadcast from a phone

Since last Thursday, anyone with Periscope, a new app owned by Twitter, can broadcast live video from a phone to the people who follow them. Meerkat, which does much the same, has been around since late February.

Viewers watch as it happens and type comments that appear on the screen. The person filming sees them and can answer out loud.

Within days, businesses have started trying it: a chef at the pass, a shop opening a delivery, a trainer running a class.

It is genuinely new, and it is easy to start. It is also easy to broadcast something you did not mean to, to an audience you cannot see.

Where it fits

• A workshop or class, for people who could not come in person.
• Behind the scenes, such as a delivery arriving or a kitchen at prep.
• A reveal: a finished room, a restored car, the first dish of a menu.
• An opening or launch, at the moment the doors open.
• Questions answered live, at a time announced well in advance.

The third is the one live video does best. A reveal happens once, so watching it as it happens is worth something that a recording afterwards is not.

Who will be watching

The audience is mostly people who already follow the account, plus anyone who happens across the broadcast. A business with forty followers will have a small audience, however good the stream.

So a broadcast needs announcing, with a date and time, where your customers already are: the website, the newsletter, the Facebook page, a sign at the counter.

Choose a time when people can watch, such as a weekday evening or a Saturday morning. A stream at two on a Tuesday afternoon reaches very few.

What the camera catches

A phone held up for twenty minutes shows far more than the person holding it is watching: customers at tables, staff who did not agree to appear, a whiteboard of bookings, a screen with someone's account open.

Addresses get broadcast without anyone noticing: a house number, a parcel label, a licence plate in the background.

Sound carries further than people expect. Conversations at the next table, a radio playing music you have no rights to broadcast, a joke meant for colleagues.

Walk the route before going live, and remove or avoid anything you would not put on the website.

What the comments do

Comments appear on screen for every viewer to see, in real time, and the person filming is the one reading them.

Most are friendly. Some ask questions you cannot answer on air, and a few are rude, from strangers with nothing better to do.

A second person reading the comments and passing on the good questions lets the person filming concentrate on the work, and keeps an unpleasant remark from becoming the story.

Connections, batteries and the shot

Live video uses a great deal of data and needs a steady connection. Use Wi-Fi where possible, and test the signal where you plan to film.

Charge the phone fully and keep a charger nearby; streaming drains a battery quickly.

Hold the phone steady, or better, put it on a small stand, and check the light. A window behind the subject turns the subject into a silhouette.

A worked example

A two-person home staging company furnishes and styles houses for sale, working mostly for listing agents in a few suburbs.

The week Periscope launched, it tried a live walkthrough of a staged townhouse the evening before an open house, announced in a single tweet an hour earlier.

A handful of people watched, mostly friends. Within a minute a stranger asked for the address, and the camera had already passed the front door, the unit number and a stack of the sellers' mail on the counter.

The sellers had agreed to listing photographs, not to a live broadcast, and the listing agent asked for the recording to come down.

The second attempt was planned: written permission from the sellers and the agent, a route that starts in the living room and never shows the door or anything with a name on it, and a colleague reading the comments.

It was announced on the company's website and Facebook page two days ahead. The recording was saved on the phone, trimmed, and posted on the website beside the before photographs.

It does not keep

Neither app is built to keep a broadcast as a lasting video. Whatever replay is offered is short-lived, so save a copy to the phone if the app allows it, and check that the copy actually saved.

A good recording can then be trimmed, uploaded to YouTube and placed on the website, where it can be found next month by somebody who never heard of the broadcast.

The website does the rest

A live stream cannot tell someone your hours, your prices, your service area or how to book. Nobody can search it or come back to it later.

The website can. Say its address during the broadcast, and make sure the page people land on carries on from what they just watched.

Treat each broadcast as a reason for people to visit the site, and the site as the place where the broadcast is kept.

The counter-case

Some businesses should broadcast live rarely or not at all: clinics, accountants, lawyers, and anyone whose work happens in clients' homes without their explicit agreement.

For many others, a short recorded clip, edited before anyone sees it, does the same job with less risk. Live is a choice, not an obligation.

Where it fits, the advice holds: plan the route and the permissions, announce it, keep a copy, and send viewers to the website for everything that lasts.

Before the first broadcast

1. Pick a moment worth watching live.
2. Get permission from anyone who will appear.
3. Walk the route and remove names and addresses.
4. Announce the time on the website and newsletter.
5. Ask a colleague to read the comments.
6. Save a copy and check it saved.
7. Post the edited video on the website.

Step three is the one the first attempt usually skips. Once a door number or a client's paperwork has been broadcast, there is no way to unsend it.

Putting the saved video on the website so every visitor can play it is covered in YouTube has moved on from Flash video.

Frequently asked questions

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