Live Streaming & Webcasting across India

A live stream is a broadcast chain with a public failure mode, so it is engineered for redundancy end to end. Camera sources, presentation feeds and remote contributors arrive at a software or hardware switcher — vMix and TriCaster are the workhorses — where graphics, lower-thirds, holding slates and playback are composited into a programme output. Audio is taken as a clean mix from the audio console, not from a camera microphone, and matched to broadcast loudness rather than mixed by ear. The programme feed is then encoded and pushed to the platform, and a second encoder runs in parallel on an independent machine so an encoder crash is a switch rather than an outage.

Connectivity is where streams actually die. A leased line is the primary path where the venue has one, with a bonded cellular unit from LiveU or Teradek aggregating multiple carrier SIMs as the backup — bonding matters because a single carrier in a venue filling with two thousand phones will degrade exactly when the keynote starts. For 1080p50 we budget 8 to 12 Mbps of stable upstream with headroom, and we test under load rather than at an empty venue in the morning. SRT is preferred over RTMP for contribution across an unreliable network because it recovers lost packets, though the destination platform usually dictates the final protocol.

The production decisions matter as much as the plumbing. A stream audience has no peripheral vision and no room ambience, so they need tighter framing, more frequent cuts and on-screen graphics to know who is speaking. Presentation content is composited beside the speaker rather than cut to full screen for long stretches, because a stream that shows only slides loses viewers within minutes. We run a confidence monitor showing the actual public stream — not the switcher programme output — so the operator sees what the audience sees including any platform-side failure, and we record the programme locally at full quality regardless of what the stream delivers.