What Is Live Streaming and How Does It Work?

Live Streaming Definition

When someone broadcasts their media simultaneously in real-time over the Internet, whether recorded or broadcast is called live streaming. Best examples and platforms are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and various other live streaming platforms. 

How Does it Work?

Live streaming can be live broadcasting of any event, occasion, meeting, trade show, award show, fair, exhibition, and more. You can simply host an event and make it available on all the social media platforms through live streaming. Moreover, attendees can watch any event or show regardless of their location by joining live streaming. 

Some main steps that take place behind the scenes in a live stream are as follows: 

1. Compression: The network uses compression for the segmentation of the video. It is just like adding a piece of new furniture to a living room. You just need to adjust a little, and it comes to the living space and fits like it was always there. 
2. Encoding: The process of converting data into a new format is called encoding. They encode the live streaming video data into an interpretable digital format recognizable to a wide variety of devices. 
3. Segmentation: Video contains a lot of digital information, making it more difficult to download a video than a pdf or image. That’s why streaming video is divided into smaller segments. 
4. Content delivery network (CDN) distribution: Live streaming breaks the content and distributes it to different networks without hassle. It can be a little hard to manage CDN for your live streaming. 
5. CDN caching: CDN cache helps to live stream closer to real-time. Moreover, it cuts the round-trip time and original server creating a second delay in the live broadcasting. 
6. Decoding & Video playback: Attendees’ devices receive, decode, and decompress the segmented video data. Hence, the media player in the device interprets the data as visual information, and the video plays.

So, this is how your live streaming can work and make you reach a global audience without hassle. Live streaming companies offer numerous features and functionalities that can be helpful in making a live streaming event seamless and immersive. Some of them are enlisted below. 

Additional Integrations You Can Get with the Best Live Streaming Services in India

13 Additional features and functionalities that the best live streaming services providers will offer you are as follows: 

1. Top-Notch Customization: You can create your own designs, icons, colors, objects, names, banner space, touchpoints, and all the other things you need in your virtual event live streaming. Moreover, with the live streaming services in India, you can add numerous animated lights and background melodies in the lobby area for a warm welcome for the audience. 
2. Virtual Booth: You and sponsors can create your own virtual booths in the virtual event platform. It can be a replica of your brand that can be helpful in a more efficient web presence. Moreover, attendees can reach you through these booths where your representatives can help the users clear all their doubts and queries. 
3. Brilliant Branding: The right live streaming services provide endless space for branding. All sponsors and partners can display their brand marketing infographics, images, videos, gifs, flyers, brochures, etc., in this place.
4. Real-Time Archiving: The best live streaming services provider offers the feature called real-time archiver that can be helpful to watch the skipped part of the live streaming. Hence, the attendees who joined the event late can archive and see the missed part of the video. 
5. Content Delivery Network: A powerful CDN can ensure high content quality, availability, and performance throughout live streaming. That’s why most streaming services keep such technology integrated into their platforms. 
6. Multi-Bitrate IP Encoding: You can combat traffic fluctuations over bandwidth with multi-bitrate IP encoding. Moreover, it makes the adaptation easy to the streaming conditions. 
7. Internet Connectivity Solutions: You can avoid lagging or restrictions during the webcast with high-internet connectivity.
8. Parallel Multi-Platform Streaming: You can easily streamline your live broadcasting over multiple social media platforms simultaneously. Hence, you can broadcast your event overall on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc., parallelly at the same time. 
9. Enriching Engagement: You can boost engagement at your virtual event live streaming with the right webcast services providers effortlessly. They offer various features such as Gamification, Clap/Hoot/Emoticon Reactions, Text and Video-Based Notifications, Social Wall, Photo Booth, Leaderboard, Q&A session, live polls, survey, etc. 
10. Dynamic Device Support: Attendees can join the live streaming with any of the devices. It will be compatible with all the PCs, laptops, mobiles, tablets, etc. So, you can enjoy live streaming from anywhere on any device. 
11. Insightful Data and Analytics: You can use detailed data & analytics to make smarter decisions for your live stream. 
12. End to End Support & 24*7 Backend Support: You can get complete technical support from the webcast services. 
13. 100% Secure and Safe: It is a 100% safe and secure way to host a virtual event. Moreover, you should not worry about any cyber threats or other technical errors in your virtual live streaming. 

So, this is a complete guide on live streaming that you may find helpful for your next live streaming event. You can use the details for a better streaming experience. 

I hope, you will find this article beneficial in understanding live streaming. For more interesting articles keep on reading dailysandesh.