Mobile Media Toolkit

WECT reporter and anchor Michelle Li explains how her newsroom uses Bambuser to live-stream footage and engage with viewers.

How do you engage an audience and share breaking news when you cover it all: from severe weather to city commissioner conferences to fire rescue. Live-streaming may be the answer.

Michelle Li and the WSFX and WECT newsroom in Wilmington, North Carolina, are using Bambuser to live stream reports from the newsroom and from the field, using laptops with webcams and the Bambuser mobile application. 

The Mobile Media Toolkit offers guidance on how to live stream content, but we caught up with Li to hear more about how Bambuser works in action. 

Why Bambuser?

The WECT newsroom began using Bambuser earlier this year. Li had used other platforms but chose Bambuser because of its mobile capabilities. “It was easy to get the app, it was easy to use, and it was easy to use in replacement of the live shot,” she said. “If we had bad weather, for instance, we could go live from our cell phones.” The Bambuser mobile app is available widely across platforms including Apple, Android, Bada, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and more. In September, Bambuser released updated apps which offered an "interesting technology solution for mobile bandwidth constraints." Read more here in this GigaOm post.  

“We try to use Bambuser everyday,” Li said. She tries to push a news conversation with user comments and feedback during the live-streaming reports. While some broadcasts inevitably garner questions about day to day happenings in the newsroom, many stories attract dozens of comments from viewers. 

What type of content works well for live-streaming reports?

Li tries to think of national and international stories that people can talk about, but the platform works well for hyper-local coverage, too. During severe weather, Li will broadcast live and relay questions that are coming in to the newsroom from Twitter and other social media sites. Li live-streams events that she thinks will be “big talkers.” Community-oriented and helpful topics like saving on electric bills, for instance, or Friday reports on upcoming weekend events, all make great live stream topics as they directly reach viewers and open the door for comments and questions. 

Ever wonder what news anchors are talking about when not on camera? The WECT newsroom live streams before and during nightly news broadcasts, which adds transparency, and humor, to the process. Currently, they use Bambuser to capture the 6:30 pm news program. See more videos on Li’s Bambuser profile here. 

Bambuser is also being used to cover Occupy Wall Street events around the globe, and was used to live-stream events during recent uprisings in Egypt, Syria, and Libya. 

Live-streaming to both complement existing coverage and to stand alone.

Recently in the region, a controversial county commissioner held an impromptu news conference. While the newsroom could not dedicate air time to covering the entire event, Li was able to get to the scene and use just a laptop to live-stream the entire event on Bambuser. “The laptop was angled poorly,” Li said, “but the information was still there.” 600 people viewed the event live, and over 1700 people viewed it overall. In this case, live-streaming with Bambuser served as a stand-alone way to cover an event that traditional news-gathering means could not.

Here is the Bambuser footage from the event:

On using a laptop versus the mobile app to stream live, it depends on where reporters can get an Internet connection and how stable the shot is going to be, Li said. But that flexibility lends itself well to covering breaking news, especially in situations where you can’t take bulky recording equipment. Li’s colleague in the newsroom, Ashlea Kosikowski, uses the mobile app from the field to cover events like police standoffs, or, one time, when a man was stuck in a sink hole. Ashlea’s Bambuser profile is here.

Here is live-streamed video from a rescue:

Get started with your own live-stream.

To get started, sign up for a Bambuser account. If you are on a laptop, plug in your webcam or DV camera, and start recording. Here is a start-up guide and screencast to help. If you are using mobile, download and install the app, login with your username and password, and start streaming!

What makes for a good live stream? User interest is key, but engagement is important, too. Most videos from WECT garner about 20 live followers on average, with more viewers overall. If it’s a planned event, adding links and promoting the event on social media and other sites can help reach viewers. Time of day may matter, too. WECT is planning to add a Bambuser live stream of a later news program, when more people will be at home and available to join the conversation. You can set a shelf-live for specific videos, or you can keep them public so viewers can catch up after a live event. 

For more, check out the Bambuser site here and download the app here.

Photo from Flickr user tomsun.