How to hold a livestreaming event

What is live streaming?

The RSA holds one of the most extensive public events programme, held at the RSA House in London - all of which are available on the website as either audio or video files. In order to make our lectures even more accessible, we are increasing the number of events which are filmed live and streamed on the web, allowing Fellows around the world to participate.

Live streaming is when a lecture or event is broadcast live across the internet, allowing users to connect in real time with the event.

How do we know what will be live streamed?

Check out the live streaming page on the RSA website, which contains a list of forthcoming events. The number of live streamed events is going to increase substantially from Autumn 2012.

How do I watch?

If you head to the live streaming page about 10 minutes before the event kicks off, you will be presented with the option to “Watch Live Event”. Clicking this will open the live broadcast – it’s as simple as that!

How could we host a live streaming event?

It is very straightforward to bring together Fellows or interested others to watch and participate in a live streaming event. Key steps are:

• Identify the event you want to watch

• Identify a suitable venue – it will need to have access to the internet and ideally a projection systems for screening the event. This could be in a home, office, community venue or somewhere else.

• Contact your Regional/National team to flag up your event and to discuss promoting it within your area.  They will be able to assist with advertising it to the Fellowship or building it into their programme of events.

• Have a test run of the equipment prior to the night, using one of the existing RSA Videos, to ensure that the connection and viewing is working correctly. Check out the FAQ page for technical specifications.

• We love to hear how Fellows’ events have gone and about any improvements that would help. You can send a brief note about your experience with the event to Matthew Mezey, our Online Community Manager. We are big fans of capturing the activity of our Fellows visually, so you can upload photos to the RSA Flickr account.

How else can we be involved?

You can use Twitter to submit questions for the speaker to answer – an RSA Twitter monitor will be present in the lecture room keeping an eye out for these questions and comments, and will Tweet the answer too. You can see the Twitter discussions for an event by following the particular #tag chosen for that event (if there is not one designated, then use #theRSA). The RSA’s Twitter monitor will introduce themselves there too.

And keep an eye on the Fellowship blog for reports from events – your tweets may well be featured!