The Livestream plugin has been incorporated into the Events plugin, so you can run livestream events alongside standard virtual or in-person events through a single system.
Note: On our hosting, the Events plugin (which now includes livestream) is available on our Business or Enterprise plans.
Turning on livestream in your community
If you were not previously using the livestream plugin, you can turn this on in the admin area by going to Plugins > Calendar and Events > Settings and enabling the livestream enabled setting.
If you were previously using the livestream plugin, your existing settings from the standalone plugin will be migrated to the Events plugin. The standalone livestream plugin will then be disabled. All livestream features will continue to work exactly as before, now powered by the Events plugin.
What’s next?
We’re working on improvements to the livestream functionality, so stay tuned for more updates soon. In the meantime, please share any feedback about this feature so we can learn from your experiences!
At the moment, it exists in the topic. It would be interesting to also display the video on the site front page, but I don’t think there’s a straightforward way to do that out of the box today.
Coming to this from Twitter where it was mentioned that the plugin is “a solid upgrade for communities that run webinars, AMAs, product launches, office hours, classes, live demos, community calls, conferences, or recurring events”, is it already possible – or might it be possible in the future – for breakout groups to be branched off from a single stream?
Hi Lindsey I haven’t used the livestream feature as yet, is there a breakdown of how to use it on here? Enabling the option in events plugin hasn’t directly shown how to create a live stream from what I see.
Yeah nothing yet, though I think maybe some customer themes display events on the front page of the site more prominently? Still plenty of ways we can improve this & events.
We recently made some improvements here, it’s just a toggle on event creation now when you provide a URL for the event location:
And we will be making further improvements in future.
Can you please expand on this a bit? Do you mean making more chat channels from a livestream event, or something else?
Yes, pretty much what you say. A few years ago I was part of a group video chat (probably on Zoom, although I forget) that involved 25 or so individuals and which was initiated by someone using Ko-Fi as their newsletter/blogging platform. After introductions were made people were split off into five groups of five so that everybody could be more involved. At the end of it all the five groups may have coalesced back into the one large group, although again I can’t quite remember.
I ask all this with the idea of – in this case – moving from Ko-Fi to Ghost for the newsletter/blogging aspect (while using Discourse as the commenting platform, courtesy of the recently expanded embedded commenting functionality), and simultaneously replacing the Zoom (?) chats/workshops aspect with this new Discourse livestream functionality.
Breakout rooms in the video / stream itself isn’t supported yet, and we’ll be limited based on what the provider supports — if you’re using a YouTube video, for example, there’s no real breakout room functionality there. We’re looking at other providers but don’t have anything done there yet.
Perhaps using threads in the event chat would work? Not quite the same, but that might be an okay workaround in certain cases.
Turning on livestream in your community
What’s next?