How to livestream your Meetup for free as events become virtual
All of us are experiencing changes to the way we do things due to the spread of COVID-19. Companies have told employees to work from home and events are either moving online or being cancelled outright. I run a monthly Meetup and like many organizers, I’m trying to figure out how to adjust with the times. Moving online means video conferencing and streaming, and there are options to choose from.
Zoom is really stepping up as a video conferencing platform for work, school and webinars. While there is a free plan, there are limitations:
- Only 2 attendees, otherwise meetings are capped at 40 minutes
- 100 participants can join the meeting for Q&A, but no livestream for embedding
- Recording is only saved locally
- Zoom webinar requires a paid account
Granted, these limitations make sense for an enterprise SaaS product, but as someone who runs a free Meetup and work on it during my “spare time”, these limitations mean that Zoom isn’t an ideal solution for a Meetup. I’m lucky to have access to a corporate Zoom account but that introduces additional complexity. So, I’ve set out to see if there’s another option.
Say hello to Jitsi. Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform with a long history. It was an early implementation of SIP, WebRTC and has changed hands a few times. Now developed by 8x8, they provide a free hosted version — no signup required! The hosted version is the full open source edition so it includes features like unlimited attendees, calendar integration and most interestingly for Meetups — one-click integration with YouTube Live.
There are a few ways to use Jitsi to stream your Meetup but here’s how I did it:
- Start by creating a YouTube Live stream and schedule it for the desired time. I’m going to assume you know how to create a stream. If you’ve never done one, refer to YouTube’s help article.
- Once created, get a Shareable Link from the options menu to add it to Meetup. You can also get a link from the stream settings.
- Visit meet.jit.si and create a meeting. I chose an easy to remember name without fear of someone guessing it because I use a password.
- Once in the meeting click “Add Password” in the dial-in info dialog.
- Share the meeting link and password with presenters through out-of-band means like email. I discovered the Google Calendar integration, which would make this part easier.
- Click the More Actions/vertical 3 dots button to show the Start Live Stream option. Click it and sign in with Google to see the YouTube live stream to select. If linking doesn’t work, copy the Stream Key from the YouTube stream settings.
- Back on YouTube click Go Live to begin the stream.
- Use YouTube’s Live chat for Q&A
And that’s it! No servers to setup or complicated desktop software to configure. It could be a tad bit smoother (OAuth implementation seems buggy) but I think most folks could figure this out. In the future I might explore hosting my own instance if there’s interest in reading about it in a post.
I hope this helps anyone out there trying to figure out how to move their in-person events online. Leave questions and comments below!
Good luck out there,
Jonathan Beri
@beriberikix
