If you have a Growth or Enterprise account on Vimeo OTT, you can stream live events to your site; Enterprise users’ events will be available in their branded apps as well. This guide walks through how to set up a live event on Vimeo OTT.
Note: Read more about what to get done before setting up your stream here.
Steps to set up your live stream:
- Creating a live stream
- Setting up a live stream
- Starting a live stream
- Ending a live stream
Creating a live stream:
Log into your Vimeo OTT admin for your project and click Content > Live Events.
A "Create live event" window will appear where you will enter a Title, Date, and Time for the live event. Note the date and time are for appearance only; no matter what date and time you enter, your event won't actually go live until you start going live from your encoder. Click Next.
You'll be brought to an event setup page. Scroll past the setup panel for now and start by configuring general information about your event. This is similar to the information you add about any other video on your site: Date, Time, Title, Short description, Full description, Media Type, Primary Collection, and Thumbnail. You can also customize additional thumbnails for your event if you wish.
⚠️Note: Changing the Title in the middle of a livestream event will only update the title on the page level, but not the title in the video player.
Select the Distribution tab on the left side to configure how viewers can access it by setting which Products it appears in (subscription or buy/rent), whether it's available to anyone or only subscribers, additional collections it lives in, which categories it belongs in, which regions can access it, set an expiration date and time for how long the archived stream will be viewable, customize the event URL, and enable or disable comments.
- The Plans, Collections, and Categories settings only apply if you add your stream to a subscription product.
- If you add your event to a TVOD product (i.e. it's a Live PPV event), we recommend setting the product as a Pre-order rather than an immediate release.
Under the Discovery tab, you can configure various metadata for your event to make your event easier to find in search results such as Tags, Genres, Cast, Crew, Rating, Advisory, License, Media ID, and other Advanced Image and Custom Metadata.
Setting up a live stream:
When you are ready to configure your encoder, go to the Setup: Live event panel at the top of the page. Be sure to check This will be a 24/7 live stream if you intend on keeping your stream live all the time (i.e. a linear channel). When you're ready, click Create URL and stream key.
From here, you can also decide whether or not you want to notify all of your users that a live event is starting. By checking Notify followers when the broadcast begins, all of your users will receive an email notification when you start going live from your encoder. By unchecking the box, your users will not be notified. You can customize the notification email by clicking Notification settings.
Note that this is only an email notification; if you have branded apps, a push notification does not get sent out.
If you're about to stream but want to check your setup, you may enable Preview Mode in order to prevent your Customers from seeing your stream until you are ready to go live. By enabling Preview Mode, you can verify your bandwidth settings, test your audio settings and make sure everything you're about to stream is ready to go. Your stream will only be visible to you until you decide to Go Live to Customers.
Copy the Stream key and Server URL and open up your encoding software.
⚠️Note: Keep your stream key private. Giving someone else your stream key will allow them to stream to your event.
Next, open up your encoding software of choice that supports RTMP Streams (Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), Wirecast, XSplit Broadcaster, & Livestream Studio all do this).
Paste the Stream URL and Key into your encoding software fields for those.
Note: If your encoder does not have a field for the Key, put a forward slash (/) at the end of your RTMP URL, then paste the key immediately following it with no spaces.
Starting a live stream:
Start streaming from your encoding software and you will be live on Vimeo OTT. Your stream will appear in the preview player on the event setup page and you can see real-time analytics by navigating to the Stats menu on the left.
If you enabled Preview Mode, your stream will only be visible to you and your OTT Team. You will need to click the "Go Live" option to exit Preview Mode and allow your Customers to see the stream.
⚠️Note: Your live event should display within 30 seconds of going live from the encoder. If it does not display within that time, use the “Check Stream Status” button at the top of the page to confirm the connection.
Ending a live stream:
Once you are finished with the live stream, click END EVENT in the Live event setup panel and end the stream in your encoder. Your live event admin will also display more analytics such as which platforms people used to watch your event as well as views by geographical regions.
Once your Live Event transcodes to a VOD, it will appear in Content > Videos. If you selected the stream to be 24/7 there will be no VOD.
If you had enabled Preview mode, your VOD would not include the portion of the stream while the setting was enabled.