Hosting simulive events with Media Playlist

Running fully live events can be stressful. Between selecting the right production team, preparing your speakers to be successful and ensuring that you have enough bandwidth on-site, there are a lot of components to juggle to make sure your event goes off without a hitch. So is it possible pre-record your event but send it out as if it was live? The answer is yes, and we'll show you how on this episode of The Prequel.

The media playlist allows hosts to upload, organize and queue multiple videos to stream during an event. Users can upload either mp4 files up to 1 GB, or a public URL from for example YouTube or Vimeo. So let's take a look!

I've gone ahead and set up an event here. Once I go live, I'll get a countdown to make sure I'm totally prepared to start the broadcast. Once the Virtual Stage is Live, I'm going to upload my pre-recorded video under the Media tab. Once I click Play, the recorded content will take over the screen so you may want to move your presenter backstage until the content is over.

In the top right corner you can see a preview of what your audience sees - don't worry they won't see the player controls on your video, only you can see that.

Once your pre-recorded content is almost over, you'll want to bring your host back on stage and stop the pre-recorded content. Once you do this, it will disappear and will be replaced by your host.

It's just that easy! The immediate benefits here are you can set up all of your content ahead of time and rearrange them to play in the order you want. And with the audience view, you can have confidence in what you're sending out to your audience. And now this frees up your team to support Polls and other interactivity features like Chat and Q&A.