Hey everyone! Anyone else here rely on google hangouts’ live streaming features? They recently announced Hangouts On Air is shutting down on august 1st.
They haven’t explained why, but this is a huge bummer because it has been enormously helpful for my podcasts. It’s been built into YouTube for the past couple years. We use it to VOIP, stream our show live as we are recording, and to host monthly on camera hangouts with our Patrons.
Is anyone figuring out how to deal with this upcoming shutdown? I’m surprised there hasn’t been more talk about it. Since my co hosts and I all live in various parts of the world, a simple live stream using one web cam wont work. Looking for other solutions that are similar. I’d go with crowdcast, but unfortunately it’s limited to 4 people simultaneously.
Woah! This is the first I’ve heard that HoA is shutting down!
I’ve switched over to Zoom, (mostly for privacy reasons and captioning support) and so far it’s working well.
There’s a free plan which is nice. Biggest stumbling block on the free plan is that if it’s more then two people, your livestream is limited to 40 min. But paid plan isn’t stupid-expensive.
Huh. Well, I haven’t used HoA recently, so that explains why I hadn’t heard.
So: I don’t have any Patrons at my livestream level (yet), but I’ve been doing it as just me showing off my current stuff and speaking on my work as a way to practice getting more comfortable on camera – also, as a social proof that I can deliver on my livestream! So, this might change when I actually have Patrons at this level, haha!
Anywyay, one of the reasons I switched to zoom was it can support way more participants with camera and mic then Google Hangouts could. I think it’s 49 people vs. HoA’s cap of 25.
Also, I use it to work around the problem of Unlisted Youtube videos still being shareable. So, I have the Zoom link on Patreon (I, as the host, need a zoom account, but Patrons don’t). They can click, join in. And that’s the livestream. Patrons can choose what they want to show, if they want to have active video/audio, and there’s a chat function too. (My Patron livestreams are basically a virtual knit/crochet/craft night. )
At the end, I take the recording, upload it as a -private- video on Youtube, and then use Youtube’s option to send out e-mail invites for people to re-watch.
The only downsides I’ve noticed so far is a) that someone who joins later has to request access to the archives, and b) if people don’t check the e-mail associated with their Patreon account.
Also, Zoom has inbuilt closed-captioning support, which was something I’d been looking for for a while.
Hi there. I’ve been using GetVokl lately and it’s been great. There were a few bugs when it first integrated with Patreon but the guys at GetVokl were really helpful and sorted it all out and we’ve been using it without any problems. It also has better audio and video quality (in my experience!) than HOA which I found to be quite poor.
