Live streaming an event: the five things that actually go wrong

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · 12 November 2026

Almost nothing that goes wrong on an event stream is about the cameras. The kit has changed beyond recognition in the time I have been doing this, which is more than twenty years in live broadcast engineering and, these days, freelance work as a video engineer on Barco E2 and vMix. The failures have hardly changed at all.

Here are the five I plan around on every job.

1. The venue internet was tested in an empty building

The pattern is familiar. Someone ran a speed test at ten in the morning, on wifi, in an empty building, and it measured download. The stream goes out at two in the afternoon, from a room full of delegates with a phone each, and a stream lives or dies on upload.

Before I trust a venue connection I want four things:

• a wired line into the encoder, however good the wifi claims to be
• an upload test on that line at the time of day the event runs, with the building as full as it will be
• upload comfortably above what the encoder is sending, so there is headroom when somebody down the corridor starts a large backup
• a second path, either a separate line or a bonded connection that combines several mobile networks, so losing one does not lose the show

Our own events team never streams over venue wifi, and for anything broadcast-critical we bond connections and test the whole chain before the doors open. That rule exists because the venue internet is the failure I expect first.

2. The stream hears the desk, not the room

This is the one people don't see coming.

The PA mix is built for the people sitting there. In a small venue the lectern microphone may barely be in it, because the speaker's own voice carries to the back. Questions from the floor often go unmiked, because the front rows can hear them. On the stream that becomes a presenter at a murmur and a question nobody at home heard, followed by a long answer to it.

The fix is a separate mix for the stream: its own feed from the desk, with every microphone that matters up in it, including a roving mic for questions. And somebody listening to the actual stream on headphones, rather than to the room, because the room lies.

3. Every speaker brings their own laptop

Each one comes with a different adaptor and different display settings, and the ways that goes wrong are well worn.

• The laptop mirrors instead of extending, and the stream gets the speaker notes.
• It sends a resolution the switcher did not expect, or refuses to send a picture at all because a video in the deck is copy-protected.
• Slides built at 4:3 land on 16:9 screens.
• The video on slide fourteen plays out of the laptop's own speakers and nowhere else.

On big shows, a screen switcher like E2 earns its place partly by taking a mess of sources and scaling them into something consistent. The cheaper fix works at any size. One show laptop, slides collected in advance, every deck opened and clicked through on that machine before the day, every embedded video checked for sound. Speakers bring a memory stick, not a computer.

4. The platform has rules of its own

The stream key belongs to someone who is on holiday. The event page was created on a personal profile. The platform changed a rule a few months ago.

That last one is real. Since 22 June 2026 LinkedIn Live has required every broadcast to be scheduled as an Event in advance, so you can no longer simply go live. If LinkedIn is the destination, the Event has to be created in advance, days ahead if you can, by someone with the right admin rights, and the stream details have to reach whoever is running the encoder.

Whatever the platform, I ask for three things well before the day: the destination set up and a private test stream sent to it, the name and mobile number of the person with admin access, and a backup destination the host can post if the main one fails.

5. The rehearsal nobody wanted

Everyone agrees a rehearsal is sensible right up until it is time to hold one. Then the chief executive is travelling, the panel cannot all make it, and the remote guest will "just join on the day".

A proper rehearsal uses the real presenters, the real slides and the real remote guest on the real link, with the stream going to a private destination and someone watching it on a phone over mobile data. Not a line check. A run of the show, or at least every transition in it: each handover between speakers, each video, each guest in and out. Transitions are where things fall over, and a rehearsal is the only time you get to find that out for free.

Bringing the kit to you, or streaming from the barn

For events at a venue, our event AV team brings Blackmagic and Sony cameras, Blackmagic vision mixers and vMix for the stream, with our own connectivity. Whether you need a vision mixer and an operator at all depends on the shape of the show, and that question has its own guide.

Sometimes the better answer is not to stream from the venue. The barn has fibre wired to the studio floor, at around 500 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up, and a stage already cabled for streaming, so streaming from the studio takes the venue internet off the list before anyone arrives. That still leaves four, but it is the one I would remove first.

If you have an event coming up, send me the running order and I will tell you where I would expect it to wobble.

Sources

• Social Media Today, LinkedIn will no longer allow real-time livestreams, 29 March 2026

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The picture at the top of this article is an illustration generated to show the set-up. It is not a photograph of a client or of a real job.