So, my God-daughter called me a few months before her wedding in Canada to ask: “Would it be possible to broadcast the wedding live on the internet for the family back in the UK?”
And my answer was: “Er… I’ll find out”. Which led me into the fledgling world of live event streaming on the internet. After a short while Googling for appropriate services, I decided the most usable was Ustream.tv, which, incredibly, was also free to use. I set myself up with an account, and made my first broadcast, using my Mac’s built-in camera. It worked fine! I rang up a friend and got him to “tune in” to me waving at the screen, and all seemed well. So far, nothing different from using Instant Messenger or Skype Video, of course, but the difference was that there could have been any number of people watching on their browsers, not just my single correspondent.
Following that success, I just needed to do a few more things. Firstly – of course – I had to check that the church had a broadband internet connection, which I could connect to from a laptop on the big day. The laptop would, in turn, be connected to a video camera. Assured that all the technology was in place, I set up my own web page with the broadcast from my Ustream.tv account embedded in it. This wasn’t strictly necessary (I could have just given people the Ustream.tv page for my account), but it gave me a nice URL on my own web site to direct people towards.
Fortunately there was a wedding rehearsal the day before the marriage ceremony, so I could test everything out. It worked really nicely, and we watched our efforts over the web live on a separate PC. On the big day itself, we had a few minutes of panic in trying to recreate the settings on the laptop to receive the video input, but we went live with a few minutes to spare, and the whole exercise was a huge success. At its peak, the broadcast had 78 viewers (the Ustream.tv page shows you how many people are watching), and by remembering to press the “record broadcast” button, we made an archive copy of our video stream for people to visit in the future. In fact, I later went and embedded this into a special web page on my own site which serves as a nice record (you may wish to ignore the first four minutes!).
A final feature offered by Ustream.tv was taken up enthusiastically by viewers – a “live chat” service. With this, a chatroom is opened alongside the broadcast, which is really great for the viewers to comment on what’s going on. As you can see on my archive page, many of them had a lot of fun with this.

So, in summary, here’s what you need to do if you’d like to broadcast your own video over the internet.

• Get yourself a video camera and laptop which plug together easily. If you’re borrowing or buying a laptop, Macbooks are far easier for this than Windows PCs.
• Set up an account with Ustream.tv
• Broadcast yourself to your Ustream.tv account in the comfort of your own home
• Get someone else to watch your broadcast, live (that’ll force you to find out the URL to quote to people!)
• Work out how you’re going to get broadband internet access at the venue
• Take the video camera and laptop to the venue, connect to the net, and repeat your test broadcast
• Tell the world the time and the URL of the broadcast
• Cross your fingers that it all works on the day. Don’t forget to click “record” as well as just “broadcast” to make an archive copy of your video stream.