Case Study: Business Insights Facebook Live

During 2020 until early 2021 I was fortunate to be co-presenter with a great friend and colleague Mario Bekes, presenting the show Business Insights with Mario & Darryn. A fantastic time with Mario sharing the studios of Alive 90.5 FM.

NEED: Broadcast studio video and audio to Facebook, using station/console audio, but not broadcast any licensed music causing Facebook to mute the Live feed. Make this as simple as possible for panel operator and co-presenter to select the correct audio/video combination to send to Facebook Live.

SOLUTION: The solution builds on another case Study (Remote Audio at Alive 90.5 FM during COVID Lockdown) with the PC providing for console audio being the same PC for broadcasting to Facebook Live.

As the console/panel audio output was before any broadcast digital audio processing, Themeo Stereo Tool was used to provide for audio compression and levelling.

To keep the cost of any hardware/software to a minimum, Apple devices were used for cameras using the software iVCam, to take the device camera feed and make available on the PC in studio. The solution was designed to accommodate 3 cameras, though Business Insights commonly uses two cameras, a wide angle and a guest close up.

Open Broadcast Studio was used as the platform for streaming to Facebook Live. A holding screen was created. The solution needed to handle 3 video sources: 3 iVCam cameras; and 3 audio sources: console/panel, theme music, camera audio. Theme music to be selected during songs and station sponsor messages, preventing Facebook for taking any action when licensed material was being played on air.

To allow for the selection of the matrix of 3 video and 3 audio sources, 9 combinations, the keyboard number pad was used for hotkeys within Open Broadcast Studio. While a dedicated vision/audio mixer could be used, this solution required no additional or paid software/hardware, always a nice outcome for a community radio station.