Cloud-based video production is finally ready for the live streaming market
SEASON 2 – EPISODE 5 – It’s amazing what can be done in the cloud these days! In this December 2nd live show Paul Richards, Chief Streaming Officer for PTZOptics will interview, Philippe Laurent, CEO of EasyLive. Laurent has finally brought video production into the ever powerful cloud with the new EasyLive SaaS platform! Built from the ground up as a cloud based application EasyLive allows teams from around the world to easily access the same live video production interface. This live show hosted with YouTube Live is part of the weekly live streaming and broadcast professional interview series by PTZOptics.
“Video production in the cloud is a powerful thing but what exactly does that mean?”, Richards ask Laurent. Lauren replys live on YouTube and Facebook “The ultimate felibility for creative teams and reliability for cloud based redundancy. One the main issues EasyLive solves for high end live streaming products is live fall back security for the entire stream.”
This and more is all explained in our live stream. Don’t miss the original show if you missed it here below.
Our final interview on cloud-based video production will be with Philippe Laurent CEO of GoEasyLive, one of the pioneers of online video editing and production. GoEasyLive is a self proclaimed “Cloud Video Editing Tool” made to make live streaming easy. The idea is simple. Capture live video from anywhere in the world, stream it to the cloud and send it anywhere you want. Eventually, this will be the future of live video production and from the context of Donnie’s question I think this is what he is asking for.
The live streaming market is on fire right now. We are moving into the early majority and low cost options will help increase demand. With Facebook and YouTube ushering in a new era of free live content distribution the industry will experience significant growth. Just like cloud-based video conferencing, I believe cloud-based video production is sure to be a success here ing the USA market.
EasyLive Show Transcript
Paul: Hello everybody Paul Richards here with PTZ optics. Thank you so much for tuning in on this Friday right before the weekend. I have with me a very interesting a CEO, Philip Laurent. How are you doing today?
EasyLive YouTube Live Stream
Philippe: hello how are you.
Paul: I’m doing great. Thank you so much for coming because I have been personally looking for a cloud-based video production solution for a long time. I’ve got stories about why. But let’s just start this show off right. Every Friday at 11.00 am Pacific, 2.00 PM eastern we live stream on YouTube and Facebook. Thank you so much for being here. if you click that like button or the subscribe button we add an extra dollar to our donation every week to the Susquehanna Valley casa helping children in need in the court system help get adoptions. So that’s really great. On the show this week obviously today is December 2nd. We are interviewing Philip from go easy live. Next Friday we’re interviewing dot works and HD relay. They do outdoor camera enclosure. So we’re going to dig into some of those cool outdoor applications and then the next Friday we’re going to interview zip tonight. A harry is a web RTC master and he has a new peer-to-peer video conferencing solution he wants to show us. And then after that it’s the holidays. So really quickly Philip I wanted to ask you a question, I want to kick off every show about where are we in this streaming world. Are we just getting started? Are things getting further along? Where would you say we are?
Philippe: I think we stand between the early adopters and the early majority. We are seeing like a [02:08 inaudible] people using either they are like just individuals or professional using live streaming. I just moved to the US [02:16 inaudible] earlier and I saw yesterday on TV like national television an advertisement from Facebook promoting Facebook live and how to easily set up a live stream. So it’s getting bigger and bigger. Some people very few start making money out of it. Its Moreno marketing and stuff like this. But we are seeing more and more people definitely starting live streaming.
Paul: Well I was just chatting with the CEO of Vmix last week and he thinks we’re at the top of this curve. I think we’re still, I think that we are just passing the early adopters. I think we’re just at the beginning of the early majority. I don’t think we’re too far along. But he tells more I think he knows the industry pretty well.
The Live Streaming Market
Cloud Based Live Streaming Adoption
Philippe: Actually it depends who you consider. Because Mix customers are usually very professional people and we have like several types of customer. We have like very professional like the same kind of Customers that Mix has. But we also have a lot of demand where it’s more like brands, have a lot of contents and they know nothing about live streaming. They don’t have the technical skills internally. And so those guys that don’t know how to setup and cutter. That they don’t know what the video switcher and so those guys I don’t think they are like between early majority and late majority. I think they are like way before that basically. So it really depends which type of customer you are speaking about.
Paul: That’s a cool one. I think that’s a very cool. All right well that sounds good to me. Let’s get the show started. So for everyone out there who knows about the show we normally go ahead and do a ton of, so sorry dealing with a couple funny things here? We normally do like eight minutes of interviews. But I thought today be better if we did a live demo. So before we get into the live demo why don’t you in 60 seconds tell us an introduction to easy live?
Cloud-powered video production platform
Video Production in the cloud
Philippe: Sure so easy live. It’s a cloud-powered video production platform. The companies based in San Francisco and in Europe. So we work globally. We basically work with the biggest organization and brands in the world. We became last April official Facebook live technical partner. We work yeah, with the biggest brands in Europe. In the US we work on different verticals. It could be sports, it could be esports, and it could be media and video production companies.
Paul: Very interesting. You guys, when you’re watching this, I mean I have been waiting for a cloud-based solution for so long. Because it happened in the video conferencing industry where everything was hardware-based, it was very expensive. You had to do everything armed with a piece of hardware. And then skype came out, GoToMeeting, WebEx, zoom all of these things, everything’s handled in the cloud and made it affordable for everyone and then the technology really started to take off. I see similarities here. Give us a little introduction to the product before we do the live demo.
Philippe: Sure so as I mentioned previously. So it’s a cloud video production platform. The aim of a solution, the aim of it is not to replace traditional mixer, either software or hardware. We are complementary to it. Because right now at the state of the technology you can’t replace what’s up and local, only part of it. There are some stuff that you can deport in the cloud. People change the way they use the products. So you can have shots with just an iPhone or just one camera and so there are certain things that you can move into the cloud, especially to save the bandwidth local. And so this is where we aim to become like the replacements of traditional final control, that’s the aim of easy-lives. So we work with Wire cast, we work with , some of our customers use Vmix solutions. So it’s really like a complimentary to, we are the entry points on the web for the producers.
Paul: Very interesting and then you want to explain this here.
Live Stream Insurance and Redundancy
Live Streaming Insurance and Redudancy
Philippe: Yeah one of the aim of being in the cloud is, one of the key feature we provide it’s like an insurance. We give you the insurance that with our tool your feed will never go down. So basically let’s say that you have a technical issue on site. Either your internet connection died and I’m sure everyone who does live streaming experience that already or your anchor did crash. Whatever happen we will detect it. And so we will replace automatically you’re [08:11 inaudible] by a six screen or a video that you will be able to customize it. And so we will deliver permanently you’re feed to your position. So we guarantee that your audience, they will never have offline line player. So you will never lose your audience. And this is what you see here on the curb. With the green line this is with us. The black one, this is without us. So if you have a tech issue you will lose your audience right away and I’m sure everyone will take a [08:39 inaudible] experimented that. And so [08:42 inaudible] you managed to grow a bit your audience back. If you have a second tech issue you’re done. And so that’s one of the biggest issue all customers face.
Paul: And just too kind of clarify that a little bit. It’s really interesting. So basically if you’re live stream goes down and you’re sending it to the cloud that you can have a fail safe to say automatically switch to this video or automatically switch to something else.
Philippe: This is something you see every day with national television. When you have like the news and they are interviewing I don’t know like a journalist is on the war area. If the satellite connection just cut they switch to another thing. Like when you’re watching TV you don’t have a black screen and it’s exactly the same. so basically so this is the new backer fees that we are releasing the new platform that we are [09:29 inaudible – really so basically here so that’s the platform we provide so you can will be aware psychosis and during that time for every professional I like Windows software will seek amy] so you have a player giving you feedback over the server and you can basically preview the feed before publishing it. So you can add logos, lower third, Social Feeds. You see we have an official twitter feed as a lower third of the bottom of the player and you can publish to multiple destination. Being in the cloud that’s one of the very cool feature. You can save a lot of bandwidth locally, you just need to publish one feature and we duplicate it for you. Either to Facebook live, YouTube, whatever all TMP platform-base.
Local LAN Streaming vs Cloud Production
Paul: Yeah that’s one of my favorite features about this. That not only are you able to do cloud-based video production. Mixing cameras, overlays, integrations but you can also basically you have joy caster built-in. I mean I don’t know how else to explain it. You can rest ream from the cloud to 4 different CDNs. It is for the maximum.
Philippe: we don’t have any limitation. You can move up to like, one server can handle like 800 difference. So I don’t think you will need 800 different points. But we have no limitation basically.
Paul: That’s amazing so if somebody needed to do 100. Because they had a hundred different Facebook pages, they were big organization they can do that. I just scrubbed back a little bit I don’t want to miss this, this next part here. This part is really interesting. So explain to us what you’re doing here with this subtitle.
Philippe: So basically here you can manage on the fly or the lower field. So you can add new [11:11 inaudible] having like Paul Richard as a new lower third. So on-the-fly you can correct things. You can change name. You can add new speakers. You can really add on-the-fly everything. You don’t need to recreate PNG’s and so on basically. You can really add new things on the fly. This is like the light management. But you can also edit these things. So if you want to edit specific elements, you have that double screen that just pops up. And here you can make all the changes, prepare everything and just hit apply when you want to go live.
Working with Wirecast, vMix, OBS and xSplit
Paul: Now this is where you’re starting to look like Wirecast and Vmix. You’ve honestly done more than OBS and some of, even I think you even got more power than xsplit. I’m not going to say you have more power than Wire cast and Vmix. But the ability to build your screen on the left, hit a button and it’s good on the right. And you could do this from like a chrome box right and you don’t need a powerful pc now to do live streaming.
Philippe: No that’s correct and you can prepare everything ahead and
One of the big thing is like on the financial standpoint some of our customers, sometimes they have just one camera. [12:21 inaudible] in Cuba whatever including solution. And so you don’t need to have a second impression using Wire cast locally. Just add a logo over lower third. You can pilot everything with your smartphone. You can entrust in the feed any kind of element. It could be 3d visual stuff, it could be any html-based element. Everything you are seeing is API driven. So we can automate every single thing. Like in Europe we work a lot with betting companies and there is [12:53 inaudible] direction. There is like a script that just rug depending on incoming statistics. And all the graphics, all the scurrying, everything is done automatically. There is no human interaction at all.
Paul: This is incredible stuff.
Philippe: That’s really like a, very like added value compared to existing local software and since everything is in the cloud you can automate stuff. You can work remotely. So it will make you save a lot of money basically on your production costs.
Paul: Yeah I mean some of the new features in Vmix actually allow you to do some of the data source pulling. But being built from the cloud up, I’ve seen companies do that and it’s such an interesting way to think about video conferencing. Now we’re talking about live streaming. It seems like it’s finally here. Explain to me what I’m looking at here.
Philippe: So right now we work with different services that provide you know custom HTML graphics. So you have like a [13:49 inaudible], stream labs. One for esports industry. [13:52 inaudible] four different industries. But with just for this example you can trigger HTML elements like animation and so on. And you see here on the top right screen you see that zombie running and so you can trigger things like animation and so and so. It just like traditional television. There is no difference basically and everything is cloud-based. And you don’t need to be a professional set that basically. You just need to click on the button we provide and that’s about it. And you can recreate the exact same TV like quality I would say. Philippe: It’s just a funny example.
Paul: its ok, it’s ok. This is interesting and kind of something that blew my mind here. So this little thing in the right hand side, this is something that you’re pulling through Facebook.
Facebook API
Cloud Based Live Streaming Management
Philippe: That’s correct. It’s a Facebook API where they give you the number of like a [14:50 inaudible] and stuff like this. And so basically when you stop publishing, see what I just did. You publish on Facebook so you have that live feed that just start on Facebook live. And you can interact with your audience. So you can say do you prefer cats or dogs and people who prefer cats will choose this [15:08 inaudible] over the other one. And so you have a live statistics coming over. And so you can create really an interaction with your audience while you go live.
Paul: I thought that was really cool. Because you could basically have statistics being pulled directly through Facebook and to trigger these statistics you’ve actually used two different emoticons and that’s just one of the many things that you can do once you start going to the cloud. Tell me a little bit about this workflow we’re looking at here.
Philippe: So basically this is just the workflow any producer use to go live. So you have an input so local and quarter. For this demo we were using a cloud based service. Then you arrived on a service. You can choose a display. You choose your encoding settings. You choose all the metadata that will be published on all the destination like COPD destinations. And you choose where you want to publish. So I just Facebook live for that example. But you could set up multiple destinations on multiple pages. The screen that you seek of live connection lost at the bottom left it’s the safety that we provide. So here you see on the work floor that the [16:17 inaudible] goes off. So basically your feed is dead whatever goes wrong. [16:22 inaudible] is dead. We will replace by the safety workflow here. So this is, that’s created. That video that you’ll be choosing that will replace that feed. And so we will guarantee the delivery like this on your feed on Facebook live or whatever destination. Like this your audience, their video player will never turn off. So they will never have to do f5 to refresh the browser and stuff like that. They will always have images coming along.
Paul: That is incredible. This is really powerful stuff here. What was I just thinking about? I mean you’ve just put so much work into this. Sometimes when you see click. I’ll be completely honest. The tear Dec core, this is blowing it out of the water. It can do a few things, it can take feeds from teradek systems and it can redistribute those feeds. But you can’t do any overlays. You can’t do, or you can you can send multiple CBN’s. But you can’t have backup streams and just the way that it automatically gives you these workflow overlays, you’ve just put so much into it. This is the part where you’re showing us the Facebook live stream itself and this will kind of drive home these API’s that you have built in here. There’s the livestream when we recorded this earlier and we can actually go ahead and give the emotion and it actually updates the vote through the API you have integrated.
Philippe: So I did the example with emoticons. But it works with hashtags, it works with whatever you define basically. So it’s very easy. We provide a default tool box that you can customize and you define the different areas. What is the name of the votes? How do you want people to vote? Using emoticons or using a specific word. And that’s about it then all the math done automatically for you. So you don’t need to be like a professional coder to set that up. We do that for you.
Remote Broadcasting and Live Stream Management
EasyLive Broadcasting
Paul: Well that’s the main thing that I see beneficial here. There’s two things. I mean there’s the safety. There’s the security. There’s the, the part of it all that you don’t need any equipment really other than maybe a camera. You just stream right to go easy live which is something we’re working on here at PTZ optics. But you’ve also just made it so that anybody can create a professional livestream. There’s no training involved. It’s a website. It’s literally click, click, click and you’re pretty close. Explain to me what we’re looking at here. This is the clip editor. This is another really powerful part of the platform.
Philippe: So one of the main advantage being in the cloud is you can clip real-time any highlights. So here I’m doing like a short clip, like 25 seconds. You can edit that. So you can change entry point, exit point, you can be frame accurate or second [19:06 inaudible] and then you can publish it real-time to your Facebook page or twitter account, YouTube channel to interact with your audience. And that’s a huge advantage of doing that in the cloud rather than other venue. Because if you do that at the venue you would just use more bandwidth. So when you upload content usually you choose the max of the available bandwidth. So you can just keep your video feed [19:30 inaudible].
Paul; so the use case here of course there’s bandwidth constraints that your alleviating ridiculously by doing this on the cloud. But I also was thinking like let’s say you’re live streaming the president and he says something ridiculous because we have this new president now. You could actually take that clip and post it to YouTube before the live stream is over.
Philippe: That’s correct. That’s the main idea. Like this you can have like more audience, like people that follow your Facebook account.
Paul: the other thing I’m thinking about is that it doesn’t have to be just this one man producer. You can have people doing this all around the world. You can have like 10 people in different countries all logged into the server right.
Philippe: That’s correct and each of them can have their own sessions. Each of them can work on the time zone they wants. We track every user. So we know what they’ve done. So if someone makes a mistake you have all the history. So you can [20:25 inaudible] so it’s pretty advanced yeah.
Paul: Because that’s the other big thing that I wasn’t even thinking about initially is the fact that now you can have video production operator social media managers. You know just for big companies. Now you’ve gotten people working on the same livestream. One of them is getting content for YouTube, one of them is getting
Content for Facebook, the other ones doing Twitter. You’ve got one guy who’s managing the stream. You got another guy who’s managing the twitter and you’ve just got the ability to not just, because a lot of the problems with, I am not going to say it’s a huge problem. But the Vex, the Wire cast, the tricaster is usually it’s like one or two people you know controlling it. Now with new tech NDI and some of the other things coming out they’re broadening their horizons. But this is cloud- based. This is like get a computer with the keyboard mouse and you’re good to go.
Philippe: Yeah and actually one of the thing we figure out is depending who is your customer like let’s take Nike or like huge brands. Usually the people in the social media team, it’s not the same department that the other teams basically. So people related to the production environments that don’t work in the same department. So it’s way easier to have a remote access and you can define okay that person from that department can do only that and that person from that department can only do that. You avoid mistakes and everyone is happy.
Paul: Beautiful. Well we’re running a little bit out on time here. We want to go over to the Q&A. what you’re looking at now really quickly because we spent the whole show on live demo and I’m glad we did. Because this is brand spanking new platform. This is definitely worth while the other thing that Philippe was showing here is the ability to set up playlist. We showed the DVR I believe. There’s a DVR capability as well where you can just set up different recordings. This is actually setting up playlist editing media all in the cloud when you have your playlist or your videos where you want them. Now and then you can just go live with them. Now could you actually be taking clips like highlights from a sports game and then putting them right back into your playlist.
Philippe: That’s the aim of it. Of course. To do like instant replay. So either you can publish it to your video feed, but you can share just the clip
To your Twitter accounts. So you can do both actually.
Paul: Oh my goodness. That is pretty much it for our, for our overview there. So I’m going to ask you to, we are going to skip the industry trends. We’re going to skip the future. We are over on time. Thank you so much for everyone’s been sticking around. I think this is good work. Very, very interesting stuff. I can’t wait to hear what your questions are in the Q&A. thanks for sticking around. Hold out for a little bit. Thanks for watching that’s our show everybody. Thank you [Music]
