How To Stream A Wedding Live On The Internet
My friend Jon emailed me a few days ago and asked how I’d been able to stream my wedding live on the Internet last year. I thought I’d layout the way I did it here, because I have a feeling it won’t be the last time someone asks me and I can just point them here to this post.
I used an iPhone to do this but it should work with an Android phone too. You will need a few things to make this all possible, they are:
- A good 3G or Wi-Fi connection at the church or reception room. Best to visit the church/venue before the big day and test the quality of the connection. If you can’t get at least a good 3G connection, your dead in the water.
- The uStream or Justin TV iPhone apps. I used uStream but that’s just my preference (and now Charlie Sheen’s too apparently).
- A website to embed the video on. This step is optional. You could just direct your viewers to the uStream or Justin TV page of your video (and that’s the easiest option). But I chose to embed the video stream on this website and direct people to it’s page here.
If you don’t have a website to embed the video on you could set up a quick blog at Tumblr. This is what I’ve chosen to do when I try to do this again for a friend of mine in New Zealand in March.
The last thing I would recommend getting, is a good stand/mount for the phone to sit in and hold it steady during the ceremony, and in a good position. The one I’ll be using in march is the Spiderpodium. Also if you can plug the phone in, you won’t have to worry about the battery running out 25 minutes into the ceremony like my old iPhone 3G did last year.
When the stream is about to start send out a Facebook message and/or a Twitter message with links to the stream and watch the viewers pour in.
So that’s a quick and very rough guide covering the apps and methods I used to successfully stream my wedding last year. We had over a hundred viewers around the world that were able to watch our wedding in Ireland that would otherwise have missed it.
Another good example of why I love my iPhone.
Thanks for the insight on this. My wedding is coming up soon and a friend told me about this concept. Thought I’d look into what it would take to make it happen and you basically answered my questions!