Start with a room sheet, not a shopping list
Before you price anything, write one line per room: its name, how many people you expect online, whether it has a sound desk, and the hours it's in use. That sheet answers the plan, the venue and the crew questions below. Each channel you add to a video plan arrives with its own name, encoder settings, player, CDN address and viewer limit, while the plan's monthly transfer serves all of them.
Keep a room on its channel for the whole event. Nobody re-enters a stream key at 9:58, and a delegate who bookmarks "Hall B" is still in the right place after lunch. Between sessions leave the encoder sending a holding card rather than stopping it.
| Rooms on air together | What fits | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Pro, 3 channels | The third is your spare |
| 3 | Pro, or Platinum if you want a spare | Pro carries 5,000 viewers per channel |
| 4 to 9 | Platinum, 10 channels | 25,000 viewers per channel, event mode, 5 renditions, at least one channel spare |
| More than that, or one room above 25,000 | Ask us in the chat | For a one-off, the event builder reaches 50,000 viewers |
An event order suits a single stage. For parallel rooms, Platinum's event mode needs no order of its own; if you'd rather book by the day, ask in the chat before you build anything.
Check transfer too. Say three rooms average 300 viewers each at 4 Mbps, for two 8-hour days. Each viewer uses about 1.8 GB an hour, so that's about 1.6 TB an hour and close to 26 TB for the event. That sum is ours. It sits well inside Pro's 100 TB if the rest of the month is quiet, and transfer past a plan's allowance is billed per TB, so add the event to your normal month before you choose.
What to ask the venue for
Add the feeds together first. Each room's encoder has to fit inside the venue's upload at the same moment, and our encoder guidance is to use about two thirds of what you measured. The paid live video plans take up to 5 Mbps per channel, audio included.
| Rooms | Each sending | Total sent | Measured upload to ask for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 4 Mbps | 16 Mbps | 24 Mbps |
| 6 | 5 Mbps | 30 Mbps | 45 Mbps |
Put these in writing with the venue's technical contact, because the sales contact will say "we have gigabit" and mean something else:
- A wired port in each room, or a cable run back to one switch, on a network kept apart from delegate Wi-Fi.
- The upload figure above as reserved capacity, not a share of a line 800 phones are also using.
- Outgoing traffic allowed: RTMP commonly uses TCP port 1935, and SRT runs over UDP, on the port your dashboard prints for each channel beside its passphrase. Hand the venue the list of UDP ports, one per room.
- Access the day before, in the rooms, with the network in its event configuration.
Use SRT from Starter up when the venue's line is shared or shaky. It resends what the network loses, and that resending needs some of the spare capacity you just asked for. OBS's guide advises an SRT latency of at least 2.5 times the round trip from encoder to server, and its default is only 120 ms, so set it on purpose in each room. OBS reads the value in microseconds, so half a second is latency=500000.
How one crew covers four rooms
Stop trying to staff the rooms and staff the desk instead. Each breakout gets a locked-off camera, a line from the room's sound desk and the presenter's laptop into a capture device, feeding a hardware encoder or a laptop running OBS or vMix. On a laptop, the camera, slides and holding card are scenes in OBS or vMix. A hardware encoder needs a small video switcher in front of it, or the room host has nothing to switch. Only the main stage gets an operator. Our encoder guides walk through OBS, vMix and several hardware encoders over RTMP. For SRT, take the settings from each channel's dashboard.
| Who | Where | Watches | Does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desk lead | Control desk | Every channel's Live tab for rate and time on air, plus each channel's live thumbnail | Calls problems, restarts encoders, owns the running order |
| Sound checker | Control desk, on headphones | One room at a time, in rotation | Catches dead microphones, which a thumbnail never shows |
| Room host | One per room, a volunteer will do | The clock and the speaker | Clips the microphone on, switches the card on and off, messages the desk |
| Roamer | Moving | The desk's messages | Goes to the room with the problem, carrying spare cables |
Locked-off rooms give you a clear record of a talk, not television. If a room needs several cameras, a vision mixer or live graphics, it needs its own operator, and if the whole event is one big stage, our live event page is the simpler route.
Record locally at every encoder. It costs a memory card, and it's your safety copy if a room's line drops for ten minutes during the talk everyone came for.
Who watches which feed?
| Audience | Give them | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Remote delegates | The programme page | A list of raw player links |
| An overflow room in the venue | A cable or local video feed straight from the room | Playing the online stream, which runs behind the room and spends your venue line |
| A wider public audience | The keynote only, restreamed to YouTube, Facebook or Twitch from that channel | Restreaming every track and diluting it |
| Registered delegates only | Expiring signed links issued by your registration site, plus a website rule | One shared link in the joining email |
One programme page that points to the right player
Remote viewers get lost when they can't work out where the talk is. Build one page on your conference site, with a tab per room and a line under each saying what's on now and next. Each channel's panel gives you an iframe for the Cue Player, and our embedding guide covers sizing on phones.
- Load one player at a time. Four autoplaying players on one page all pull video at once, and four muted pictures help nobody.
- Name tabs after rooms or tracks, and show times in the viewer's own time zone as well as the venue's.
- Give one person edit rights and the desk's phone number. When Hall B runs 15 minutes late, the page has to say so within a minute or two.
Get speaker consent when you accept the talk
Ask at the point of acceptance, because a refusal on the morning means a dark room. Read this as a starting point, not legal advice: video of identifiable people is personal data under GDPR, which needs a lawful basis if your event or audience falls under it, so have your legal or data protection contact approve the wording.
- Say what will happen: streamed live, to whom (registered delegates only, or publicly on YouTube, Facebook or Twitch, which set their own rules on keeping a copy), recorded, kept for how long.
- Offer a clear no for each, so someone can agree to the live stream but not the recording.
- Ask about slides: images, clips and music in a deck may belong to someone else, and unreleased data may belong to their employer.
- Put refusals on the desk's running order, by type. No stream: the room host shows the holding card and the room's audio is cut for exactly that slot. No recording: the stream runs, the encoder's local recording stops, and the desk notes the slot so it's left out of anything you keep or publish. Pro and Platinum channels also have a rewind window and kept recordings, so ask in the chat before the event how to keep a refused slot out of them, and don't promise the speaker until you have that answer.
Delegates matter too: put the camera at the back, so the audience shows as backs of heads, and post a notice at the door of streamed rooms.
Rehearse all the rooms at the same moment
Testing rooms one by one proves nothing about the venue line, because only the sum can break it. The day before, run every channel together for at least an hour with delegate Wi-Fi switched on, watching the rate on each Live tab. A channel works as soon as it's created, so this runs on the same players the audience will use.
Recordings last a limited time (Platinum's window is the longest, at 90 days), so before the event, ask in the chat how to save the talks you want to keep, and give someone that job. Your local encoder copies are yours either way. The viewer list downloads as a spreadsheet for your sponsors, and analytics show which room held its audience.
Questions people ask
- How many channels do we need for a three-track conference?
- Three, one per room. Pro carries exactly three, and you can rehearse all of them together on those same channels. Platinum's ten only earn their place if you want a spare ready for a failed room.
- Can every room use one encoder and switch between them?
- Not for parallel tracks: rooms on air together each need their own feed and their own channel, and a separate encoder per room keeps one failure from taking out two rooms. One encoder is the simple answer only when talks happen one after another on a single stage.
- Do online viewers count against the venue's internet?
- No, only your outgoing feeds do, plus anyone in the building watching online. Viewers elsewhere play from the CDN city nearest them, which is why an overflow room should take a local feed and not the web player.