221 - Stream Live with WordPress and WP Livestream

Interview with Nathan Parikh and Nathan Wrigley

Deal Alert: 15% off WP Livestream with code “VIP”.

So it might have passed you by, but now we can (and apparently do) all create our own T.V. channels! Services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch and Vimeo make this process pretty much painless, but pretty much painless is not completely painless; and that’s the subject of the podcast today. A WordPress plugin called WP Livestream which makes this as simple as possible. If you go back just a few years, the very idea that this would bo something that you could do would’ve seemed crazy, but here we are, and it’s an amazing reality we live in!

You might think that it’s really not that hard to go live, and you’d be right about that. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have made it possible to do that with an account and the click of a button, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here.

WP Livestream offers you the ability to do something much more useful and without the hassle of trying to write the code yourself.

The WP Livestream plugin enables you to embed the feed for your YouTube channel, not an individual livestream. This can be really useful.

Take for example the WP Builds LIVE Page. It is a page that I want to be available all the time so that whenever I click the ‘go live’ button in Streamyard (the SaaS app that I use to create the shows), the live is on that page right away.

This has obvious benefits:

• I don’t have to copy / paste the embed code everytime I hit ‘go live’
• I can tell everyone this URL and they can bookmark for easy access, no trying to track the stream down on YouTube (et al.)
• You don’t have to be logged into some other platform to see the stream
• It’s all on my own domain and I can surround that livestream with whatever content I would like people to see

You see, it’s much better to do it this way, or at least that’s what I think!

On the podcast Nathan and I (also Nathan!) chat about how he came to develop the plugin. It was, as is so often true, a case of scratching his own itch. He needed a place where the members of his church could reliably go during the Covid lockdown to see church services. No need to sign up anywhere, just go to the church website and watch the content every time it goes live.

We talk about what options are available, such as the destinations that you can choose. At the time of writing they are:

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Twitch
• Vimeo

It’s pretty much a set-it-and-forget-it type of plugin. No more copy codes every single time you go live. The amount of times that I’ve forgotten to paste the embed onto the WP Builds website with seconds to spare. This is literally a lifesaver. If you forget to update the embed code, there is no livestream at all. WP Livestream removes this point of failure as it’s always polling whichever service you use; as soon as you go live, WP Livestream works that out and updates itself with the correct embed code and that’s it. You don’t need to worry about it, it just happens.

There’s a little bit more to the plugin too. WP Livestream also has the ability to display a pop-up banner on your entire site to say that you’re currently live. This does not show, for obvious reasons, on the live page itself, but it a great way to get your website visitors to notice your stream and hop on.

Although this is not yet live, Nathan is also working on a feature that would be really great to have… comments. The idea here is that comments would come into Facebook, YouTube and wherever else it’s being posted to and those comments would appear on your website too. You could reply there instead of having to have multiple tabs open in your browser, constantly checking to see if new comments were rolling in. Nice!

Another roadmap feature is the ability to style the livestream player some more. Currently is quite plain, but hopefully in the future, this will make it possible to have a player that matches your branding more.

So go check out the WP Livestream plugin and get yourself 15% off with the code “VIP”.

As always, leave some comments on the WP Builds website, or in the thread for this podcast episode (#221) in the WP Builds Facebook Group, and remember to come back every Monday at 2pm UK time when we go LIVE for our ‘This Week in WordPress‘ show.

Mentioned in this podcast:

Deal Alert: 15% off WP Livestream with code “VIP”.