Live Playlist Best Practices
First time must be truly live
If it is your first time running a Live Playlist on a particular channel, you must first “go live” from an encoder.
Videos in the live playlist
Each video that you add to the playlist has to be longer than 2 minutes.
First video should contain a buffer
Because processing times can vary, Live Playlists may start up to 2 minutes after the scheduled start time. For this reason, we recommend that your first video should contain a count down or hold music and your actual presentation should start at least two minutes later.
Add a closing buffer video at the end
It’s a best practice to add a simple video at the end of your Live Playlist containing music as a gradual exit so your Live Playlist does not end too abruptly and people can exit your event while you still have your exit music or similar buffer video playing. It’s also common to switch to a truly live broadcast on the same channel immediately after the pre-recorded content is concluded. You’ll need this buffer video music to hold people’s attention during the few seconds it takes to seamlessly switch to your truly live broadcast.
Video properties should match
Although you can add lots of different videos to the same List Playlist in the order you want them to be automatically played (typically following your set agenda for the event), each video’s properties should be the same as the others in the playlist. For example, if one video has closed captions in both English and Spanish, then all videos in the playlist should have captions in both English and Spanish. And, all videos in the playlist should have the same resolution. For example, if one video is 720p, they all should be 720p. The more identical your list of videos is, the less risk of anything going wrong as the playlist transitions automatically from one video to the next.
Turn live captioning off for the channel
For simulated live events, because the content pre-recorded, your captions come from the VOD files, and do not leverage the Watson Live Captioning (WLC) feature that is normally used when broadcasting truly live events. For this reason, it’s important that you turn WLC off for the channel you will be using for Live Playlists. If you leave it on, it will disable the captions you’ve setup on the VODs. It’s a best practice to use the VOD captions because you can edit them in advance to make sure they are perfect and free from misspellings, etc.
