What does “Multi-Stream” mean to you?
Multi-stream means simultaneously live streaming to multiple channels. Are those multiple channels social profiles, individual viewers, or at multiple rates and resolutions?
Multi-stream could mean the ability to simultaneously stream live video to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and your private viewing page. When you have a live event and want wide distribution, this kind of multi-stream is a great way to reach multiple audiences.
Streaming to multiple social media services makes it easy to reach your friends and subscribers, and costs nothing. Because it is done for you by the DiscoverVideo system, you don’t need multiple encoders or excessive uplink bandwidth. The DiscoverVideo system pushes your stream to your selected social media sites.
Multi-stream is included in Arcus streaming service and is built-in to the DEVOS and DVExpress enterprise platform.
With Arcus, your stream can also be distributed via your own custom player page, or embedded in any web page. And you can even monetize your media, sell “tickets” to view your event, accept donations, and more.
Lecture Capture
Multi-stream could mean the viewing of multiple streams simultaneously. We are not talking about a single player showing a split screen, or a quad view (you can do that too). No, we are talking about showing one, two, three, or four live streams simultaneously where the viewer can move them around and resize them on-the-fly. You would expect the videos to be related, such as multiple camera angles of a special event, but they don’t have to be.
Popular uses for this type of multi-streams include lecture capture (as illustrated) where the viewer can decide what video they wish to view large or small. When viewing recorded lectures, the videos remain in sync and the student can easily navigate the set that might include video of the instructor, the instructor’s computer, document camera, and wide angle view of the classroom.
Skills Assessment
Multi-Stream is also at the center of skills assessment configurations. Capturing multiple videos of students demonstrating clinical skills and reviewing the video in after-action reviews provides valuable learning experiences.
Skills assessment is similar to lecture capture and uses multi-stream video to not only capture and record, but to empower teams to learn from the live video experience and to provide live feedback to the learners.
Viewing live or on-demand multi-view video supported in browsers, of course, but is even supported in the free DiscoverVideo iOS app.
Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR)
For the more technically-minded, “multi-stream” could mean streaming the same content at multiple bit rates and resolutions. ABR, especially for live video, is particularly useful for mobile viewers where bandwidth may be highly variable. The DiscoverVideo DEVOS system supports live transcoding of live video into multiple rates and resolutions.
Multi-Channel Encoder
Multi-stream could mean an encoder that can produce multiple streams. Consider Spider, which can produce up to 10 streams: two for each of the four independent live audio/video inputs, and two for a production program that consists of one or more of the video inputs.
DiscoverVideo Does EVERY Kind of Multi-Stream
However you choose to think about “multi-stream,” DiscoverVideo supports it all. That’s good to know as your needs change and evolve.
Need help with your multiple streams? Drop a line and we’re more than happy to answer any questions. [email protected]
Cheers,
Rich Mavrogeanes
