If your OTT site includes live events and your setup has been approved for livestreaming by our team, you can start creating live events. (If you're interested in including livestreaming, please contact our sales team).
Log in to your Vimeo OTT admin for your project and navigate to the Content tab. Click Create live event.
A "Create live event" window will appear where you will enter a Title, Date, and Time for the live event. Note the date and time are for appearance only; no matter what date and time you enter, your event won't actually go live until you start going live from your encoder. Click Next.
You'll be brought to an event setup page. Scroll past the setup panel for now and start by configuring general information about your event. This is similar to the information you add about any other video on your site: Date, Time, Title, Short description, Full description, Media Type, Primary Collection, and Thumbnail. You can also customize additional thumbnails for your event if you wish.
Select the Distribution tab on the left side to configure how viewers can access it by setting which Products it appears in, whether it's available to anyone or only subscribers, additional collections it lives in, which categories it belongs in, which regions can access it, customize the event URL, and enable or disable comments.
Under the Discovery tab, you can configure various metadata for your event to make your event easier to find in search results such as Tags, Genres, Cast, Crew, Rating, Advisory, License, Media ID, and other Advanced Image and Custom Metadata.
When your ready to configure your encoder, go to the Setup: Live event panel at the top of the page. Be sure to check This will be a 24/7 live stream if you intend on keeping your stream live all the time (i.e. a linear channel). When you're ready, click Create URL and stream key.
From here, you can also decide whether or not you want to notify all of your users that a live event is starting. By checking Notify followers when the broadcast begins, all of your users will receive an email notification when you start going live from your encoder. By unchecking the box, your users will not be notified. You can customize the notification email by clicking Notification settings.
Note that this is only an email notification; if you have branded apps, a push notification does not get sent out.
If you're about to stream but want to check your setup, you may enable Preview Mode in order to prevent your Customers from seeing your stream until you are ready to go live. By enabling Preview Mode, you can verify your bandwidth settings, test your audio settings and make sure everything you're about to stream is ready to go. Your stream will only be visible to you until you decide to Go Live to Customers.
Copy the Stream key and Server URL and open up your encoding software.
⚠️Note: Keep your stream key private. Giving someone else your stream key will allow them to stream to your event.
Next, open up your encoding software of choice that supports RTMP Streams (Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), Wirecast, XSplit Broadcaster, & Livestream Studio all do this).
Paste the Stream URL and Key into your encoding software fields for those.
Note: If your encoder does not have a field for the Key, put a forward slash (/) at the end of your RTMP URL, then paste the key immediately following it with no spaces.
Start streaming from your encoding software and you will be live on Vimeo OTT. Your stream will appear in the preview player on the event setup page and you can see real-time analytics by navigating to the Stats menu on the left.
If you enabled Preview Mode, your stream will only be visible to you and your OTT Team. You will need to click the "Go Live" option to exit Preview Mode and allow your Customers to see the stream.
Once you are finished with the live stream, click END EVENT in the Live event setup panel and end the stream in your encoder. Your live event admin will also display more analytics such as which platforms people used to watch your event as well as views by geographical regions.
Vimeo OTT will archive the live event as a video. Once completed, it will show up in the events list (Content > Live events) to edit as a pre-recorded event.
If you had enabled Preview mode, your VOD will not include the portion of the stream while the setting was enabled.
